What We Cooked At Home During Lock-Down (Simply Cook Review)

What We Cooked At Home During Lock-Down is a paid collaborative post with Simply Cook. Food has been one of our constants during lockdown. Initially, the worry that the world and his wife were stockpiling and with me shielding we couldn’t get our regular order, and then it gave us something to look forward to. A home-cooked meal, with set meals on certain days of the week helping to delineate and define what day it was.

What We Cooked At Home During Lock-Down

For us, lockdown meant that the husbeast was shopping for our family and the teens for their grandparents each week. We were lucky that shortages due to stockpiling were short-lived (apart from flour, yeast and caster sugar), however, we live in a rural part of the country and local supermarkets do not always have the best range of herbs and spices.

Which is where Simply Cook fits into our lockdown cookery experience. Simply Cook is a meal box with a difference. Rather than a complete meal box where you are sent everything to make the meal, Simply Cool supply the herbs and spices required so you can shop locally for the main ingredients and use store cupboard items.

You can 4 boxes of flavour pots in one letterbox delivery (yes, the meal box fits through the letterbox) and a menu card for each meal.

Each menu card comes with a small perforated section with the ingredients needed, so you can take that shopping with you or you can download their app which has the same information.

We loved the fact that the meal boxes have much better use-by dates on them (compared to complete meal boxes that we have had), which worked perfectly during lockdown. Also, the fact that we can shop local and reduce food miles, which is great if you use a local butcher or want to substitute ingredients that someone in the family isn’t keen on (courgettes are seen as the devil’s food here)!

The menu cards have simple easy to follow instructions, so much so that the teens took over cooking using them.

I liked the fact that I didn’t have to have a cupboard full of spices and herbs (which we never us within their use-by date) and that the food was delicious.

What also surprised us was that the food actually looked a lot like the images on the front of the cards, which is really encouraging for the person preparing the meal.

This Moghul Chicken Korma (click here to find out the origins of the Korma) that Maxi cooked was lush and I didn’t need to run around the supermarket looking for 101 ingredients. If you want to get your kids in the kitchen, then check out our cooking with children section.

You can cancel your subscription at any time and it is £9.99 a box and your first box is £3.00 a total bargain, especially as you can pick from range of 38 trial box recipes.