After spying a sponsored post for SimplyCook on Facebook, I decided to give them a go. (See, social media advertising works sometimes!) The premise of SimplyCook is that every month they send you a box which contains four recipe cards and four ingredient kits - no recipe takes longer than 25 minutes to cook.
Each recipe serves two people, and it should cost between £3-£6 per person to buy the other ingredients. It sounds like a great way to cook some new recipes during the week when we don't have time to spend a few hours cooking, although the value is something I will be questioning.
I decided to make their cod and chorizo broth first. It cost about £6 for the other ingredients, though Sainsbury's had offers on at the time on the cod and chorizo. I never consider the cost of the meals we cook but this is one of the selling points of SimplyCook. The kit costs £10 per month, which is £2.50 per recipe, but the first box is half price. This discount made the cost of the meal around £3.60 each.
The recipe was very easy to follow, though I would have made a few tweaks to the running order. For example, they tell you to cook your chorizo right at the beginning but I would do that last. I would also check cooking times on the food you buy - the recipe suggested putting the cod in the oven for ten minutes whereas the packaging said it needed cooking for fifteen minutes. Since it was fish I was dealing with, which I rarely cook, I decided to follow the packaging and not the recipe.
The result was a dish that I probably wouldn't have done off the top of my head, and a tasty dish at that. I loved the cod and chorizo combo, and there was a real warmth to the dish. The broth was very rich, but very delicious, and it got me to use cannellini beans, an ingredient I wouldn't usually have in my kitchen cupboard.
One of the ingredient pots sent was chicken stock to make the broth, and I'm curious to see how this dish would compare if I made it again and used my own chicken stock, herbs and spice mixes. Until I do that and make the other recipes, my verdict is still out.
SimplyCook looks promising based on my first impression. If I order a second box though, I'm glad I'll be able to pick which recipes I want them to send me as I'm not looking forward to trying out one of the recipes they sent me!
What do you think to the idea? x
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