For those of you who read my blog regularly you will know that I am vegetarian but the rest of my family are not and that I cook for us all from scratch. Rarely jars (unless Husband has done the shopping) and absolutely no ready meals in this house. I am not a brilliant cook or a fancy one, tending to cook traditional meals like Shepard's pie, casseroles, chilli and spaghetti bolognaise. However, I was quite intrigued when approached by miniscoff to see what they have come up with.
I had never heard of miniscoff before so I looked them up on the Internet straight away. They offer "grown up organic meals for children of all ages". Recognising that most Mums want to cook for their families but in today's busy world this isn't always possible, they developed miniscoff! What I really like is that they do not use machines, they use real chefs and cook everything by hand in small batches. Each meal is then frozen really quickly to lock in all the goodness, until you need it. Sounds like the next best thing to my cooking!! (haha).
A few days later I was delighted to see this package arrive at my door. It was a cool box full of meals with exciting names like Ali Babas Sheppard's Pie, Creamy Salmon Pasta and Chilli Yum Yum:
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| Quite a large cool box |
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| Food was well wrapped and still frozen |
These meals might be prepackaged but they claim they are delicious and healthy with: NO preservatives, artificial additives, colouring, fillers, GMOs, sweeteners and no unnecessary salt or sugar (just enough and not too much).
Instead what they do offer is "100% organic ingredients (approved by the Soil Association), premium cut meats from only the best British producers, locally sourced vegetables where possible and all the love and attention you'd put in if you made it yourself"). Got to be good right?
Okay time for my mini testers Poppy (aged 3) and Rosie (aged 14 months) to put them to the test (oh and they let Daddy have a taste too....for research purposes of course). They tested the organic curly wurly chicken and the organic planet spaghetti.
What I noticed first about these products was the size portion, they are very generous, in fact they look like adult portions. I decided to split one meal between the two of them and then add vegetables on the side. This worked out perfectly for their little tummies.
You can cook these meals either in the oven or the microwave depending on time. I did one each way and to be honest Husband told me they tasted just as good both ways. In fact he was really impressed and thought they were "pretty tasty".
I will let the photos do the talking next:
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As you can see they both look happy. Not a scrap of food was left between them with either meal (much to Daddy's disappointment) and they gave them the thumbs up. Poppy even told me they were "delicious"! Great praise indeed. I was impressed to see there were good sized peices of meat and the sauces looked chunky and tasty.
Now as I said at the start, I do like to cook for my family so I am not going to stop just because I have discovered miniscoff. However, it would be very handy to have a few of these in the freezer for those extra busy days and I would not feel bad or guilty for feeding my children these. Also if I saw the name miniscoff in a restaurant I would definitley pick that meal for my girls. Quite lucky really as I have a freezer full of them right now:
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| My top freezer draw full of miniscoff meals |
Miniscoff are currently available at Ocado and Abel and Cole.
Karen x
For the record I was provided with 6 of these meals to trial and review but all words and opinions are my own.
