Trying Sainsbury’s curry ready meals

Sainsbury’s curry ready meals are a quick and easy way to enjoy a curry in the home. When you are short of time or just fancy a curry in a hurry just pop one in the microwave.

I don’t often cook ready meals. I find it is just as quick to prepare a meal from scratch as to cook ready meals for the whole family. You also know what ingredients you are adding to the dish. Recently it was National Curry Week. My husband is a great lover of curry but I am not very good at making it from scratch. There are so many herbs and spices that go into the dish it takes ages to make a good curry. Fortunately Sainsbury’s got in touch to see if I wanted to try out their curry ready meals.

Sainsbury’s curry ready meals

Sainsbury’s have recently done some research that indicates that British people spend  £30,331 on curry in their lifetime and 43% will now opt for a ready meal over a takeaway.  The survey also revealed that as well as standard store cupboard spices like chilli, paprika and cumin we are now buying more exotic ingredients like garam masala, cumin and coriander. Over a third of Britons are happy to spend up to three hours in the kitchen perfecting the perfect curry.

Sainbury’s have taken this research on board and come up with a range of curry ready meals which are full of flavour. They have a large range of main dishes and side dishes to make authentic but light dishes. On visiting Sainsbury’s to pick up some if the dishes I was impressed with the variety in the range. There was a large selection of main meals, some with rice and some without. These ranged from hot curries like madras to the milder ones like korma. Plenty of side dishes were also available like Crispy Beetroot and Chilli Samosas and Bombay potatoes as well as different types of naan bread and poppadoms.  You can also get different types of pillau rice.  We chose a selection of different dishes from the range.

Preparing Sainsbury’s curry ready meals

The good thing about ready meals is that they are easy to prepare. The clue is in the name – ready meal. The dishes can either be cooked in the microwave or the oven. I chose to use the oven so everything would be ready at the same time. If you are cooking several dishes this is definitely the best way to prepare them. To warm everything though took about 25 minutes. This was the same time as it took me to cook up some rice to go along with the dishes.

When everything was ready the family sat down to eat. There were four mains, chicken korma, butter chicken, chicken madras and chicken jalfrezi. I am not normally a lover of hot curry but the flavours in each of these dishes was spot on. They were flavourful rather than overwhelmingly hot. The main dishes also contained quite a lot of meat which was nice, some ready meals are more sauce than meat. The side dishes were also very tasty and full of flavour.

Overall we found the meal really enjoyable and I would definitely consider buying Sainsbury’s curry ready meals again. They were good value, there was plenty in them and the whole family enjoyed them.

If you fancy making your own curry then here are some recipes that work really well.

• Chicken and chickpea curry which is filling and perfect for colder days.
• Chinese chicken curry which is full of oriental flavour.
• Chicken one pot curry which is a Caribbean curry.

I was sent a voucher to get some Sainsbury’s curry ready meals to try. I was not obliged to say anything nice and my opinions are my own.