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Skip to main contentaah! BISTO… the most annoyingly spelled brand name in culinary history. It’s famous for its gravy, which as you’d hope, is top notch here. It’s a shame then that everything else is distinctly underwhelming. The mash is disappointingly bland, and the peas were a bit hard. The sausages are weird and chewy, though have that… [Read More]
Quite watery. Noodles are softer than Pot Noodle. Teriyaki flavour is quite subtle, but pleasant: an undertone of ginger, garlic and soy. No actual chicken to speak of – and if you read the back of the packet, it covers itself as “chicken flavour noodle soup”. There’s not much of a garnish, but there’s a… [Read More]
Not your typical ready meal, this! I’ve had bao buns in restaurants before and was keen to see how the microwave version would fare. The result is pretty good. The box contains 6 buns, and provides little microwave bags for each one. Just put a bun in the bag and pop it in the microwave… [Read More]
My second Charlie Bigham meal – this time with rice. It’s already in better stead than the Moroccan Chicken Tagine. It comes with some foil you need to wrap around the curry and the rice, which are in two separate containers. It then goes in the oven for about half an hour. You can really… [Read More]
Sainsbury’s has a real thing for laksa. Apart from the soup I reviewed in 2012, I haven’t seen it anywhere else. I think this is an iteration on the same product: a creamy, lemongrass-rich sauce with fresh vegetables and chunks of chicken. There’s more chicken than last time (though it still feels a bit mediocre)… [Read More]
I’ve recently moved to an area that has a Waitrose. There’s an entire fridge section dedicated to ‘Charlie Bigham’ meals. I thought he was the bloke who wrote Black Mirror. A man of many talents then…! These are all marketed as high quality, low effort meals for two. Unlike other Charlie Bigham meals, you can’t… [Read More]
The ragu is not rich, it’s basically tinned tomatoes with some garlic. It’s not bad, but it’s nothing special. There’s a pitiful quantity of cabbage, which just about tips the balance for it being 1 of your 5 a day. The meatballs allegedly contain beef and pork, but all I can taste is vegetable. It’s… [Read More]
This meal self-effacingly refers to itself as a “SIDE”, which I think does it a disservice. There’s plenty of chicken, so this would be a reasonable as a main course. But at a £3.50 RRP, this would be quite a pricey main course – and a VERY expensive side dish, considering this is standard ‘ASDA’… [Read More]
At £3.75 RRP, and with no microwave option, this is a little on the pricy / faffy end. It never fully crisps up like an oven-baked macaroni cheese should, so loses a couple of stars for all that. That being said, it does taste nice: an umami-rich creamy sauce and a slight crunch of breadcrumbs… [Read More]
As an out-and-proud meat eater, and lifelong Indian food fanatic, I was highly skeptical of how jackfruit might stack up against, say, chicken tandoori. Peeling back the plastic, I thought there had been some mistake – this actually looks like chicken. Great big chunks of white matter, complete with strands of muscle. It does such… [Read More]