Do you ever find yourself feeling a bit stuck in a rut when it comes to family meals?
I know that I certainly do!
Trying to find suitable family dinner options that are both delicious and nutritious, which will appeal to 3 little ones with very different tastes can certainly be a challenge. We have our go-to staples of course - Spaghetti bolognese is always a hit, as is anything involving pizza! - but I find myself getting bored very quickly if we repeat meals too often. Variety is the spice of life after all, or so they say - my children would disagree!
I've heard a lot of people recommend meal boxes to help expand culinary horizons, but although we've tried them on and off in the past - I usually find that they're just not that cost effective for us. There'll always be something the children won't eat and so I'll need to buy alternative meals for them, and although the quality of ingredients is always good - the cost is much higher than I would usually pay per person.
So when I discovered Simply Cook, I was intrigued.
Unlike meal boxes, Simply Cook offers you restaurant quality meals at more affordable prices and with far less hassle.
Simply Cook boxes do not contain the main meal ingredients, instead they contain the herbs and spices that you need to take your meal from average to restaurant quality - along with a step-by-step recipe card full of tips to help you along the way.
Our trial box contained what we needed for four different meals - A halloumi salad, a Korma curry, a pasta dish and - one of our family favourites - chilli con carne!
I was immediately impressed with how easy the recipe cards were to follow, and one thing I really loved was that each of them has a tear-off strip listing the ingredients you need for the dish - so that you can pop it into your purse to take shopping, so handy!
We decided we'd try the chilli con carne first as I knew it was something the whole family would enjoy - my other half has a tried and tested chilli recipe that he's been using for years so in all honesty, he was quite reluctant to try a new approach but we went with it and we were very impressed!
The kit contained chilli paste, chilli stock and chipotle spice mix. As you can see from the photograph below, they all had a shelf life of almost a year - something we struggled with when using full meal boxes is the short shelf life of the ingredients, so this is ideal for us as we tend to chop and change our meal plan often.
Another thing I really loved about Simply Cook is that you can make your own amendments and omissions without wasting any products. For example, the chilli con carne recipe called for kidney beans but none of us like them - if this had been a full meal kit then they would have gone to waste, whereas with Simply Cook we could simply skip them.
The result was simply delicious! A restaurant quality chilli within 20 minutes. The recipe was so simple to follow, and the tips really helped - the flavours were much richer and smokier than we're usually able to achieve ourselves, all of us thoroughly enjoyed this chilli con carne.
At £9.99 per month with free delivery, Simply Cook offers a much more cost effective way to enjoy restaurant quality meals at home than full meal box subcriptions with the added ease of fitting through your letterbox so need to worry about scheduling deliveries.
You can pause or cancel your subscription at any time, too. You can even try your first box for just £3, so you've really got nothing to lose!
You can find out more at www.simplycook.com
