AD| Tasty, healthy meals you can make at home with SimplyCook

Like many parents we’ve been spending a lot more time at home with our children than ever before. We’re so used to our children having their snack and packed lunch in school, followed by something a tad more healthy for dinner when they come home from school. However, since lockdown began and I’ve been working from home while trying to home educate our children, mealtimes have become a more rushed affair.

I quite often find myself having a quick search in the freezer for fish fingers or chicken nuggets because I simply haven’t had time to think about what I could cook for dinner.

Thankfully, SimplyCook came to my rescue and helped me rediscover the joy of cooking again. SimplyCook is a subscription-based recipe box service that provides a monthly box containing four recipes and four ingredient kits that can be added to fresh ingredients you buy from the supermarket to create mouthwatering dishes that the whole family can enjoy.

How does SimplyCook work?

SimplyCook create exciting, easy-to-follow recipes. All you need to do is visit their website and choose from a selection of their most popular dishes.

The boxes are just £9.99 each and contain four kits to help you cook four delicious meals. Inside my box I received the following four kits:

• Nasi Goreng – meaning “rice, fried” is a popular household and hawker food stall dish in Indonesia and Malaysia and is often eaten for breakfast. Great for using up leftover rice, this dish is characterised by its savoury paste and sweet, sticky soy sauce called Katjap (or Kecap) Manis. It’s often topped with crispy shallots for texture and served with some tangy, pickled cucumbers alongside.
• Sausage & Fennel Pasta – For a mini-upgrade to the classic pasta-bake, SimplyCook have added a little sophistication to this mid-week staple by tossing in some kale and creamy ricotta along with their aromatic blend of fennel seed, lemon peel, herbs, red onion and smoked sea salt. A simpler but stylish one-pot dish for the SimplyCook range.
• Korean Bulgogi – Bulgogi is a classic Korean dish where meats are grilled on a BBQ, marinated in a sweet and savoury sauce. This recipe uses quorn mince which really takes on the flavours of the Bulgogi marinade with soy, garlic, ginger along with some grated apple for tanginess. Bulgogi is often served over rice with lots of accompaniments like spicy sauces and crisp veg. Feel free to get creative!
• Chicken & Mushroom Risotto – SimplyCook designed a rich porcini mushroom rub for the chicken which adds great depth of flavour to the dish. Caramelised pan-roasted mushrooms folded through the risotto bring texture and a gentle earthiness to the plate. Risotto often takes a little longer to cook but it’s a wonderful meal for the whole family and worth the extra few minutes of stirring for that signature creamy and satisfying dish.

Chicken & Mushroom Risotto

For this recipe, SimplyCook provide a white wine reduction, porcini crumb and risotto stock. I just needed to add an onion, 2 chicken breast fillets, 300g mushrooms, 140g arborio risotto rice and 30g parmesan cheese.

I really like that the recipe card has a ‘tear off’ strip you can take with you to the supermarket to help you shop for your ingredients. Plus, you can download the SimplyCook app for on-the-go shopping lists, saving you time from writing your own list.

I decided to cook the chicken & mushroom risotto from my SimplyCook box. The recipe was easy to follow with its step-by-step instructions. So easy in fact, that one of my eight year old twins decided to help with the cooking too. She chopped up the mushrooms and helped me to cook them, along with frying the mushrooms. She even kept an eye on the risotto rice, telling me when to add more stock to it!

The recipe card was very easy to follow. This meal has two servings, but could easily add more risotto rice to the pan and cook an extra two chicken breast fillets so you could feed your whole family. There was definitely enough stock, porcini crumb and white wine reduction for four meals.

Pictured below is the finished meal and I can confirm that it tasted amazing. The white wine reduction really added flavour to the rice and the porcini crumb rub on the chicken was divine.

Overall, this was a tasty meal for the whole family and I can’t wait to try out the other receipts in this box!

Disclaimer: For the purpose of this review I was sent one SimplyCook subscription box and compensated for my time.