New Ready, steady cook meal kits from Aldi :: Honest review

Summertime and the weather is… not so hot actually. Neither is the kitchen because I really don’t have time to be in it.It’s the summer holiday here and a week in we are full throttle. By that I mean I’m in need a Valium from around 6.34am and the kids are fighting, making enough noise to warrant ASBOs and spending all my hard earned cash eating me out of house and home. Seriously though, why do children eat so much?

Due to the aforementioned issues of mass food consumption and sudden manic atmosphere in my house, in beginning to run out of ingredients and time to faff about making dinner. I am quite the fan of take out pizza and fish fingers (hello, solidaritea) but I don’t think it’s an ideal thing for any food to become the sole dietary sustenance for children or adults.

When Aldi, where I do all my shopping – which I’ve mentioned on social media many times – asked me to try their new food kits I jumped at the chance. Rumour has it that they are tasty and quick prepped and done in 15mins, contain all the ingredients that you need AND they are balanced. Ahh balance, I vaguely remember you before my mind went to pot over the holibobs. So we tried them, we instagram storied ourselves trying them – the kids helped, because that’s an “activity” don’t you know – and we LOVED THEM.

In an effort to be totally transparent I wanted to share that we had tried the following:

• Beef Stroganoff
• Chicken Tikka
• Yellow Bean Pork Stir Fry

Now, our thoughts:

The Beef Stroganoff.

Honestly, I was a bit dubious about this. Beef goes one of two ways: tough or super tasty and tender. Sadly, I felt that the beef in this kit was leaning towards tough. I’m not a beef eater myself but I’ve found that, unless marinaded for days on end, or slow cooked, beef leans towards chewy. Adam said he didn’t find the beef unpleasant, rather that he felt it would have been better if it was slow cooked. I tend to agree, however, we had 2 kiddos that did not agree. Mainly because both Toby and Edith – of all children, the Princess of Picky – both asked for seconds and Edith stole some of her dads. The sauce and mushrooms were both fresh and delish. I couldn’t fault them. In all truthfulness, after the way the kids responded to this meal, I will 100% be buying it again it fed all 3 of them and Adam (note: it wouldn’t have fed me as well, so larger families, this could get costly… and by that I mean £7.98 – for two packs – so you know, not bank breaking). Next time I will just whack it all in a slow cooker and go out. We served it with rice, but I would love to try this with taglitelli.

The Chicken Tikka

Hmm. At first glance I wasn’t impressed with this. Firstly, why would you bother? You can chop a pepper and onion, buy a pot sauce and some chicken for £3.79 (the price of one of these) and it didn’t look like it was that much… yeah, I was wrong. The chicken chunks are flipping HUGE, so if you buy one, cut them into quarters (yeah, they were THAT big) for faster cooking and to feed a family of 4-5 (2 adults, 2 kids and a baby too I would guess) with ease. Honestly, it says 2 main portions but unless you have the appetite of Man vs Food, forget that and expect it to do everyone. Mega impressed. I would say this was on the spicier side, I added a touch of cream to cool it down, but Reuben and I would have loved it as it is. Just add rice, a naan bread and to be honest if you want to go all out and have a curry night, I’d add poppadoms and maybe some of Aldi’s indian snacks. You really wouldn’t regret it!

The Yellow Bean stir fry

You know what, I loved this! It wasn’t too spicy for the kids and it was genuinely really delicious. The pork was so flavoursome – which I often think it hard with Pork. This was another £3.99 and it was another one that, like the stroganoff, would have fed me, Adam and the kids unless I had added more noodles. I think there was more than enough meat for us all, but I did add some noodles to the kids so that they could get a decent portion. All in all, I loved it and with some spring rolls on the side, it was another winner for us.

In summary, I really liked the kits. I’m not sure that the Stroganoff or Pork kits were 100% ideal for a big family, but I think that is always the case. The tikka kit was phenomenal and I can’t sing it’s praises enough – it’s been a while since I’ve been so impressed with a product, I genuinely expected crap chicken or not very much and it was perfect.

If you want to try any of these, or the other kits that they have available – 7 in total I think – then you can find them in Aldi stores.