Recently hubby and I have become a bit bored with cooking the same meals night after night, week after week and so I happened to come across an advert for Simply Cook. They had a deal, if you bought four recipe kits it would cost £3, so I thought, “Well, what is there to lose?” So I sent off for the pack. The idea is quite simple, they send you a letter-sized box which contains 4 recipe kits and step-by-step recipe cards.

You supply the meat, vegetables, rice, etc., and they say that in 20 minutes you’ll have a meal. So we decided to put it to the test….

Our recipe of choice was Beef Rendang, the description from Simply Cook was:

Often referred to as “wet rendang” as opposed to the dry, slow cooked version, you’ll whizz through preparing this speedy beef curry with ginger, chilli, clove and desiccated coconut.

Ingredients

120 basmati rice

250g sirloin/rump steak
Cut into finger-width strips

1 small onion

200ml coconut milk

Store Cupboard

Vegetable oil

They do suggest that you can add 6 new potatoes, (which we didn’t do) and 100g green beans (which we did) and we also put in a sliced pepper. Plus they suggest an alternative of chopped chicken instead of steak and courgettes instead of green beans.

How did I get on?

The instructions were very clear and on reading them, it seemed a little too easy to be making an authentic curry. We cooked the rice as normal, though hubby added some turmeric spice for a bit of colour and the green beans were boiled, drained and kept aside.

The beef strips were cooked quickly in a pan over medium heat, 20 seconds on each side to sear and lightly browned. Removed and kept aside.

The onions were fried for two minutes, along with the peppers and the first flavour pod was added, Garlic Paste, which was cooked for a further two minutes.

The Rendang Paste was stirred in, with a splash of water, and fried for another two minutes.

The coconut milk was poured into the pan, simmered for ten minutes, adding water if it was too dry.

Finally, we added the green beans and the beef with its juices, sprinkled over the Rendang Garnish, cooked for a further two minutes and then it was ready to serve!

Thoughts

I have to say that the smells which were enveloping our kitchen as we were making this were amazing! Even though the dish didn’t look as appetising as I would have liked, it tasted so good. It was a little spicy, but that only added to the experience. There was just enough for the two of us, but they do show you the amount of ingredients on the recipe card if you wanted to serve six.

As for their claim that you can cook this in 20 minutes… yes, absolutely you can.

I am looking forward to making the other meals we have in our pack and I will let you know how we get on with those!

If you would like to trial a four recipe box for a £1 then follow this link: https://simplycook.com/invite/Q85V36?via=app