Displaying items by tag: ready meal

We ate Chicken Kievs from Waitrose last night and when Scarlett served them up she gave the usual hot butter squirting in your eye health and safety warning, which made me think, has anyone ever really been blinded by a Chicken Kiev?

What's that I hear you say? The Amelie Flam-kuche flatpack is a new on-line, delicious, UK delivery ready meal, from father and son team Regis and Alex Crepy at Amelie Restaurant in Cambridge. Flammekeuche is a traditional Alsace dish, so think France meets Germany. It could be described as a skinny pizza, but it's rather more like an unleavened pastry or flatbread. Thin with crispy edges as it comes out of the oven and the perfect snack at any time of the day. You can choose the toppings when ordering your flatpack (which contains 4 bases and will keep for up to 4 days in the fridge) then it's a quick assembly job; which is also fun and easy for children to do, cook for six minutes in a very hot oven. Et Voila!

• sour cream is traditionally used on a flammekueche base, here with Amelie signature creme fraiche
• Toppings are freshly prepared. Piquant, sliced onions, mushrooms and mozzarella with the pesto adding colour and punch
• Preheat the oven to 230 C and it takes just six minutes to cook
• Voila! We chose the mushroom and mozzarella flatpack
•  

Look at this excellent selection of ready made deli-products! I don't usually buy ready made salads and sandwich fillings but was sent these to review by Wolff-Evans and Sons after doing a little feature on them for our Dish of the Day.Their original Homeslaw made with savoy,red and white cabbage was dressed with a creamy mayonnaise and some onion adding a bit of punch. Looks just like homemade coleslaw and tasted as good as the one I make myself. Egg mayonnaise, well I am always dubious about pre-prepared sandwich fillings and expected at least a whiff of eggy sulphur to put me off when I opened the lid. Tah Dah! Nothing but fresh,simple and tasty free range eggs with mayonnaise and also very well seasoned; although I did add even more cracked black pepper to mine. The Tuna fraiche was the highlight for me. A set, light spread which was creamy and delicately flavoured with capers and onion and some texture of free range egg. It could pass off as a dinner party starter, reminding me in style of a salmon mousse. Far superior than I imagined and wolfed down by my family in minutes. Available at your local East of England Co-Op.

• Tuna Fraiche
• Homeslaw
• Potato Salad
•  

We went "In Deep" at the Grapesense wine class this week, we went to South America. We tried Atlantico Sur, Marselan from the Garzon Vineyard in Uruguay. Then we started talking about Uruguay and how it's remembered for Fray Bentos meat pies. Fray Bentos is a large Uruguayan town where the Liebig Company produced tinned meats and beef oxo for export to the UK. The Fray Bentos brand was launched in 1899, initially for corned beef, then later pies. By 1961, when Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney was launched, pie production had shifted to Hackney. From the dozen or so of us at the wine class, no one admitted to having ever eaten one of the pies! I remember my Grandma always had one in her kitchen cupboard but I have never tried one, so for the sake of my Grapesense friends - here is the photo story of the Steak and Ale pie that I bought and ate.

I chose the Steak and Ale pie as it had the highest meat content (25%) and by the way the pastry is 24% so not sure what the rest is?! The smell of the pie still lingers in my kitchen an hour or so later, that kind of school-dinner, cheap chip-shop pie smell, like kidneys cooking, although the pie doesn't have any kidneys in it. The pastry looked revolting when I took the lid off the tin but had an impressive puffiness to it when out of the oven, which soon deflated leaving a soggy under layer. The gravy was very salty with scruffy small pieces of beef that were all on one side of the tin.

Interesting Fray Bentos Facts!

Sales of the pies plummeted during the Falklands War. Uruguay being the neighbour of Argentina.

Sean Bean (the actor) always has a Fray Bentos pie on hand when filming abroad, he loves them.

The empty tin makes a good dog bowl.

• Impressive looking puff pastry out of the oven
• Soggy bottom of the pastry lid
• Small pieces of beef
• Surprising choice of pies at Morrisons
• The deep fill steak and ale pie
• Slimy pastry when opened
•