A round up of some new food stuffs that have landed on my door mat this month.
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| Uncle Ben's Pearl Wheat Quinoa & wholegrain |
Recently, I was discussing with some fellow allotmenteers how they often find themselves returning from the plot late in the evening and are too tired to cook up the fabulous produce they're growing. All decreed that this was terrible. A couple of days later I heard about these Uncle Ben's whole grain pouches.
They take two minutes in the microwave and you could get a meal on the plates in under ten minutes if you gave your plot veg a quick wash and sautéed it up in a griddle pan.
I tried the rice with some of our courgettes, is anyone else having a courgette glut?
The rice is quite spongy, not usually a feature of rice, on the plus side it does easily soak up the flavours of whatever you add to it. The quinoa is much better, a fair solution if you need to get tea on the table very quickly.
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| Ritz Crisp & Thin Sea Salt & Black Pepper |
These super thin crackers shaped liked crisps are a bit of a conundrum. It's crisp and thin and baked, it resembles a crisp without that greasy translucency. I really liked the cracker part of these but the flavours weren't amazing.
We took them on a road trip and played guess the flavour, the general consensus was that the sea salt and black pepper ones were definitely ketchup. No one seemed to believe me when I said they weren't even when I produced the packet which was then closely scrutinised for added tomato.
I'd like to see a plain version because they are perfectly shaped for dipping and don't need to be flavoured when your plunging them into a good chutney or dip.
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| Sharwoods Chow Mein |
Short cuts and speedy meals seems to be popular with the new releases this summer. I'm a big advocate of meal planning and batch cooking and usually champion cooking from scratch but I've never perfected the chow mein. So I thought that these Sharwood stir-ins might be interesting.
My Mom gave me this tub because she'd bought a packet and found the pots too garlicky. I didn't have the same issue although I still don't think I've perfected the chow mein.
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| Golden Oreo Limited Edition Peanut Butter Oreo |
I use Oreo's in cooking, but I don't usually buy them just to enjoy as stand alone biscuit, now I'm wondering why! Peanut butter flavoured anything always scores big with me, add in the chocolatey goodness of the Oreo biscuit and you're on to a winner. But why are they limited edition? Hopefully they'll prove to be popular enough to keep around like the Peanut Kit Kat Chunky. My favourite Oreo recipe at the moment is the Waitrose one for Mississippi Mud Pie. My mind is already tweaking it to have a peanut Oreo crust and peanut brittle sprinkles.
There are some new Golden Oreo's too. Without the chocolate they just weren't the same, Golden Oreo's are plain sandwich biscuits with a creamy vanilla filling. So just a round custard cream really, pretty good but I feel like we've seen it before.
Have you tried anything new this month?
Unless otherwise stated all of the above products were free press samples.
As always, all opinions are my own.