M KITCHEN Ready meals, shine, I remember ready meals. I used to eat them sometimes when I was a kid. Past being a kid, I used to eat them when I didn’t know how to cook. I used to eat them when I left home for the first time and my Mum gave me freezer bags laden with them. I famously don’t have a microwave so I’m not inclined to buy ready meals these days, I don’t want to wait on a 25 minute disappointment to come out of the oven. I’d rather get my hands dirty. So I don’t typically buy ready meals (except pizzas) but if one lands in my lap, or finds itself at death’s door in the reduced counter, then who I am to say no? The ready meal must have made strides since I last checked in, right? You can get coffee in cans that heats itself so ready meals must have some new science that I don’t know about. Right??
Morrisons (pronounced Morrinsons) is one of my all-time favourite supermarkets. It’s in the top five FOR SURE. Imagine this kid’s surprise when he got an email out of the blue (the best kind) telling him (me) that the Morrisons “M Kitchen” roadshow was coming to Manchester. I was cock-a-hoop! I’ve seen these roadshows from afar on TV and often wondered what it would be like to be down there at the front rocking out whilst the chefs cr8 and demonstr8. It was a magical day. I was given the key to the roadshow city by having a one-on-one with the main man behind the M Kitchen super lab, Neil Nugent. Flipping Nora! M Kitchen for the uninitiated is the Morrisons in-house pre-prepared food house, their range is over 400 lines deep and 7,000 products strong. The roadshow was in town to promote new blooms in their Tex Mex, Italian, Chinese and Comfort Food (English classics) ranges. Neil Nugent was a great guy, he’s my new Dad now. We really hit it off and he knew loads of cool stuff about ready meals. I was so hooked on Nuge’s knowledge that I completely missed the cooking demonstration; I did note that mashed potato was the theme and it seemed to consist of two chefs mashing potatoes for about twenty minutes. A pretty non-visual act, hardly Cirque du Soleil. The public’s imagination appeared to be captured mind; there was laughter and chiming in. I can’t imagine the audience’s participation was anything other than saucy comment. “Ooh, that mash must be creamy by now”. “Ooh, you’ll have to come round and peel my spuds”. “Ooh, I don’t normally give anything to pan handlers but I’ll make an exception for you, love”. Neil Nugent even said he didn’t know why they were giving them a mashed potato masterclass. “Heh” I replied, inwardly screaming “I KNOW, RIGHT!!!! HAHAHAHHAAHAHHAHAHHAAHAARRRGGHGHHHHHH”. I was kindly gifted a goody bag of M Kitchen ready meals and told to go home and get jiggy. DAY 1 : BLAZIN’ CHICKEN BURRITO First up was a “Blazin’ Chicken Burrito” from the Tex Mex range. You get two burritos per portion for a two person service. This received a 2 out of 3 chilli rating on the packaging and carried the legend “created by Neil Nugent”. I’ve met him, he’s my new Dad! The star of the show wasn’t anything within the burrito, more the jalapenos that dotted the tops – they were fruity and packed a bigger blast than your average. Lady Legend noted that the chunks of chicken were a little small and identikit for her liking. Happens they were but that’s what you generally get with a burrito so no bones about it for me. If I get granulated baby bite size bits of chicken in a kebab then I’m steaming but we cool with it here. The habanero chilli-spiced rice promised much and delivered, though I could have done with more of it. The innards of the burrito were identifiable and not blurred into mush as is often the case with supermarket standards. Our “soft flour tortillas” suffered a bit from the oven process, they were crispy in places but we secretly like that sometimes shhhh. I’d say it was the best supermarket burrito I’ve had but I don’t think I’ve had many. It wasn’t as good as a burrito from say barburrito or your local burrito stand, nor would it stand up against a keenly home-made attempt. If you’re in a housebound hurry dough, this is your man. DAY 2 : CHINESE TAKEAWAY BAG You know those supermarket takeaway carry-bags? Yeah, them. We’ve all been there. Maybe it wasn’t our finest hour. Maybe it was surprisingly ok. People in olden days used to carry briefcases, now they carry supermarket takeaway carry-bags. Picture the scene, it was Friday night. Me and Lady Legend were on the bevwahs. We’d procured a box-set of stubbies from Aldi and a 6-case of Steinhausers. Aldi, for my money, currently offers the best stubby in town – the previous best was Tesco’s “Biere Speciale” but they seem to have lanced that range from the shelves, replacing it with the inferior 4% “Biere D’or”. Hallowed days of picking up a 20-piece of Biere Speciale for around 6 dollar are a distant memory, get down to Aldi for a £3.55 10-deck of the next best stuff. Anyway, Friday night is the perfect night to bungle one of these Chinese Meal for 2s outta the fridge. We were set, half-cut and basically gagging for it. The bag promised: 1 x Chinese Chicken Curry & Egg Fried Rice 1 x Sweet & Sour Chicken & Egg Fried Rice 2 x Spring Rolls Prawn Crackers First source of amusement came from the size of the spring rolls. They were tiddlers! Imagine a cocktail sausage, certainly no bigger than a thumb. My hopes were at basement level but these diminutive dumplings were dense and flavourful. When I first removed the meals from their slips the first impression was my, this doesn’t look half bad actually. The rice looked fresh and the saucy susans in the main sector looked just like the cover girls on the front cover. That’s one thing about all of these M Kitchen ready meals, the packaging photography is grade A realistic. Often these things tend to polish the proverbial and when you remove the sleeve to see your baby for the first time you’re like, ARGH! Kill it! No such scares here, they don’t lie about what lies beneath. Onward and inward, post-oven the rice had regrettably gone crispy and dry – a key gripe I have with rice-based ready meals. There must be a better way! The Chinese curry was surprisingly a bit of alright, aromatic as promised and creamy with coconut high notes. The sweet and sour chicken was pretty good too, though the chicken lacked (for better or worse) that trademark sweet and sour coating. The chicken pieces in general were large and pleasing. The prawn crackers did as prawn crackers does, fabulous. I expected it to be dirty and it was not, if it was I couldn’t tell and it slipped down well with 8 beers. DAY 3: PASTA MEALS FOR 1 x2 On Sunday (after a night off ready meals) we drifted for the Sausage Pasta Bake and Spicy Bacon Spaghetti. Both meals are intended for one so Lady Legend and I split the difference between our plates. At this stage I feel like a ready meal veteran, I’m a cold hardened killer as I wash the cardboard sleeves aside and ready my fork for puncturing the plastic film. I feel like spiking my fork into ready meals is the closest that I’m ever going to get to stabbing someone. I’m thrashing, expressionless, while the cold wet spray hits my face. At first I’m thinking gross, this is worse than cold bean juice on the hand or the merest jut of cat food jelly, Jesus, it just landed on my lips. But then it changes and I’m just doing a job, like a hired gun in an abattoir, it’s all part of the job. I’ll get a shower when I get home, this is a frenzy. It’s like on films when there’s a fight and one party is toppled but the other party gets down and works the face until it’s a bloodied pulp and onlookers are backing off mouths agape. Jesus, you killed him. I stand up and shake the excess from my knuckles and snout some cocaine off the curb. What? He had it coming!! I digress. Hopes weren’t high for this twin set, I’ll be honest. It wasn’t as celebratory a line-up as I’d usually like for my Sunday grace. I’d say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but the photographs that Morrisons use are so representative that maybe you should. They didn’t look that horrific, it’s more that the whole “ready meal for 1” concept reminds me of darker days in the early 2000s. The Sausage Pasta Bake was almost entirely right-on. It wasn’t what I know as a bake, i.e. crisped and crunched, but it was a stand-up pasta set piece. The pasta itself, more a wide tunneled rigatoni than the billed penne, was cooked nicely and not too soft. The sausage pieces were as firm as the ready meal process allows and the sauce coverage was excellently generous. The Spicy Bacon Spaghetti had an unusual but not unpleasant taste; we put this down to the parsley-infused tomato sauce. The spicy gave it a piquant interest that it dearly needed. This spaghetti was bordering on Heinz rather than the genuine article, you felt almost fraudulent attempting to twiddle a length of this round your fork. The sauce was plentiful and the flavours, while not fresh, were authentic of somewhere and it didn’t leave one floundering nor guilt-ridden. Lady Legend asked if she were to serve this up as home-made cuisine, would I believe her. I believe in her so but it’s almost beyond the realms of shock and awe that anyone, outside of test conditions, could recreate the X-factor of a ready meal. Same goes for packaged sandwiches and shop bought pizzas. You can’t touch this. DAY 4: CHICKEN MADRAS & ULTIMATE BEEF RIB Lady Legend was at work so I settled down for a generous luncheon alone with a Chicken Madras. Monday lunch-times do not get better than this. Once more I was started by the synergy between the cover art and the actual product, outstanding I thought, let games commence. The colours were alive and kicking, there was detail in the sauce, I spied cardamom pods, I spied curry leaves. The chicken allocation was laid on thick, each piece a buttery gift. The curry carried a spice rating of 2 chillis, a medium heat. The warmth brought no temple moisture to speak of but it was lively enough for a lunch time serving. Truth be told, I had a really good time with this. My friend Dave speaks fondly of Morrisons curry range and I respect his opinion highly. This is the man who once snapped a baguette to fit in a carrier bag but hated himself afterwards. I rate this madras on a par with a sub-standard takeaway (that’s higher praise than it sounds) and infinitely better than a wayward first time home-made attempt. Last act was the most-anticipated, “The Ultimate Beef Rib”. We served this with French fries (au natch) and a green salad (take it or leave it, mate)…and another rack of ribs (lol) from another supermarket. Neil Nuge told me that the riblet arrives at your door having already been cooked for 6-8 hours in its vacuum pack in a water bath. Nice work if you can get it. All you, the pleb, have left to do is wang it in the oven for 35 minutes and then dreb the marinade sachet on for the final 5. First thing first on dragging this bone doctor out of the box, it’s a bleeding monster. Honest to Betsy, I’ve not seen a rib this size. It’s proper Flintstones/Henry VIII proportions, it forces that Tim the Tool Man Taylor noise. The Nugentnator explained that the rib was technically a “short rib” but M Kitchen instruct their butchers to leave on the parts that other rib cuts takes off. Not like the arsey/elbow parts, more the extra beef that goes towards making mince or burgers. Extra burger on my rib? Who’s not loving that action. The spectacle of such a stacked rib is shocking. Those looking to achieve “instant legend status” should present a full spread of these ribs to your hungry mates at half time next time you’re showing the big game round yours. They’d go ballistic. Such is the size, this single rib is intended for 1-2 people. A single rib that could be adequate for 2…I never thought I’d see the day. I actually sampled the ultimate beef rib with the Nuge himself. He talked me through it, showed me the crust his chef had caramelised from the marinade, and carved it forth. Sporks were handed and I felt waves of relief that fingers would not be in play. I felt forced to comment after taking my first mouthful. I tried to think of something that wasn’t “it’s falling off the bone” but that’s what came out. It had already technically fallen off the bone in the carving process seconds earlier so this was beyond cliché and beyond stupid. Then I tried to think of something that wasn’t “it’s melt in the mouth” but that’s what came out too. I hated myself but I hated the chef more when he took the rib platter away after I’d only had two shy sporkfuls. I relished making a meal of myself when I recreated the rib in my own kitchen. Maybe I’d shut the curtains, maybe I’d put on some mood music. Turns out I couldn’t quite recreate the delectability of that taster rib I’d experienced from the M Kitchen. Mine didn’t have a crust, the marinade had given it that sticky icky but there wasn’t that barbeque/grilled firmness that M Kitchen’s own delivered. I’d recommend going off-grid on the cooking instructions and blasting the rib under the grill for the final 5. Nil crusts aside, it didn’t taint proceedings too much as it still looked hot to trot, I carved it into stringy sub-sections and we dove in. The hickory smoked marinade was a sweet jam, I enjoyed. The meat was at points never-ending; it felt like a good day. You could tell this serving had been slow cooked; it fell apart like beef from a stew. I can’t help but feel like extra crust or slight singe would have really made it, I left the cooking circle a mite disappointed but I blame myself. If cooked right, as I experienced at the hands of the M Kitchen roadshow, this rib is indeed ultimate and it blows all other supermarket pre-prepared rib offerings out of the water. My ready meal days are behind me, for now, I look forward to getting back amongst the cabbage patch. I enjoyed my dalliance and I know at some point I’ll be back. I feel like ready meals have changed since I’ve been away. I asked Neil about the ready meal reputation for added preservatives and whatnots…staying agents and the like. He told me that Morrisons don’t do that, people see sodiums and ting in the ingreds list and they jump to conclusions – any of that foreign looking chemical matter is a by-product of an ingredient in there. The make-up of bacon, balsamic vinegar and mustard will all add to the curious element quota. Read the back of any of the ready meals enjoyed above and you’ll be surprised to find out how pure they really are. It’s almost as if ready meals aren’t dirty any more. I don’t know which way is up. I asked him about the often freakishly long shelf lives of some ready meals, he told me that anything will keep for a reasonable time if cooked and then air-tightly packaged in the correct conditions. I asked him other stupid stuff too but I forget what he said. I recall that the dish he was most excited about in this new M Kitchen range was the aforementioned monster rib. At one point when Neil was explaining which other cuts of meat benefit from the slow cooking water technique, it seemed as if he was insulting me. He was reeling off words like “beef cheek, pork collar, lamb neck”. If he’d of finished on “frog legs” I would have likely ran home crying. Leave me alone you big man! Dad? So yeah, Morrisons is cool. I like it in there. I like the Morrisons that have those water jetting spray mists for their vegetables and herbs (check it out). That’s some really space age stuff and their produce looks glowing for it. You can get wicked decent weird vegetables there too and the range is generally more spicy than a lot of its competitors. The M Kitchen range rolls so deep that I find it tricky to put a definitive finger on it. Of the samples I tasted, at least 3-4 of them suggest that there are diamonds out there to be had. The rest can’t be grumbled at really either for the bargain basement prices. Get your mining hat on and dig deep!
