SimplyCook, a subscription-based spice kit service, will deliver you a pack of 4 meal kits to make some restaurant-quality meals at home, and your first SimplyCook recipe subscription box is free; you just pay £1 P&P!
The meal kits come with all the spices and flavourings you need to knock up a delicious meal at home in minutes! You just add the contents of the pack to the additional ingredients that you'll find on supplied recipe cards included in the box, and you're off and running. The kits normally have recipes that include 4-6 items you may already have at home, or need to buy, such as chicken breast, coconut milk,
The recipes are normally ready to be eaten in around 15 to 20 minutes, meaning you get a fast and delicious meal, especially useful for a quick weeknight meal, that will be a cheaper option than splashing out on an expensive takeaway when time isn't on your side! You can choose any 4 of the kits, from the dozens of available options on the SimplyCook website so that you can make some completely different types of meals with your kits! Each kit contains 3 tubs of authentic flavoured ingredients, and they may include dry ingredients such as spice blend or sauces and stocks that, together, allow you to make up a delicious meal!
The kits are actually pretty useful for anyone who likes to meal plan, as the step-by-step recipe cards tell you what ingredients you need to get to be able to make the dishes, so you can then plan your meals for the week and add the ingredients to your shopping list for when you do your weekly shop. As someone with ADHD who struggles to plan meals and get the right ingredients, I find this very useful; otherwise, I tend to buy random things, and also spend far more as I just grab what I 'think' we might use, which is an increased cost and can add to our food waste, neither of which is good!
You could also make up the meals in advance by doing some batch cooking if you wanted to, so perhaps on a Sunday, make the meals for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday dinners, so when you get home, you can reheat them! You could also freeze them if you wanted and then just take them out of the freezer the night before, ready to be heated up when you get home.
As a qualified chef, I have found these kits of excellent quality and the resulting meals to be really tasty. There are over 50 recipe kits available, with new meals and new recipe options coming through regularly, so you don't need to worry about finding something you, or the kids, will like! There are lots of vegan and vegetarian options, and the boxes have a long shelf life, so it doesn't matter if you don't use them for a few months; they'll be ready for use when you need them!
The recipe boxes offers meal choices for all palettes. I'm a fan of the Goan fish curry and the Thai red prawn curry, and less adventurous members of my family enjoy dishes like the beef stroganoff and breaded chicken options. The kits all come with a spice rating, so you'll be easily able to distinguish which kist will be suitable for the family. The recipe cards also tell you the number of calories in the finished recipes, which is useful if you are watching your calorie intake.
I'm also very prone to adapting the kits to what we have at home already, rather than using the recipe cards. Take the chicken thighs I made recently. Rather than following the recipe, I combined all the contents of the Simply Cook Quesadilla kit with the thighs, in a bowl and mixed them all together. I then baked the chicken, and we ended up with a delicious chicken dinner, and the leftover chicken was then used in lunch wraps the next day and was very tasty, so it shows that although the recipes are great, you can also go off and make up your own recipes as well!
SimplyCook is a subscription service; however, you can cancel this service once the first box has arrived, and so if you decide that you don't want to continue receiving the spice boxes in the future (which would be at the full price of £9.99 per month), then you can very simply cancel this online. You also have the option to buy one-off boxes should you still want to receive the boxes but would prefer to choose when you receive them.
The SimplyCook deal allows you to choose any 4 kits for free; you just pay £1 postage. It's simple and is a great way to try these kits without spending a fortune; after all, you're only paying a quid for postage, so that's just 25p per meal kit, which is a cracking deal!
