Category Archives: Food

Food

Waitrose chunky vegetable soup review

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Description: “A hearty and warming soup of carrots, swede, green beans and parsnip with red lentils and pearl barley.”

Health: OK – only 236 calories for the pot so additional sustenance required, but good on all key vital indicators.

Taste: Meh. No interesting spice, no meat for texture – nothing wrong with it for what it is but just totally uninspiring. If they’d swapped out sweet potato or butternut squash for the regular potatoes in there that would have been something.

Full-o-meter: OK. Not great. Too low-cal, not enough protein to really carry you.

Verdict: 2/5. I’m sure it’d rate higher for someone that liked plain vegetable soup, but for me it was a bit dull.

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Marco Pierre White glorious Toulouse sausage and bean cassoulet review

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Description: “A hearty broth of haricot beans and sautéed Toulouse sausage, finished with vegetables and herbs. GLORIOUS.” Actually, this one is fair enough.

Health: Not bad – 394 calories for the pot, good amount of fibre. Could have more protein…

Taste: Better than the other two MPW’s I’ve tried recently – good texture, flavourful, tomato-based soup, delicious morsels of sausage and the beans are nice too. I know Rick Stein loves a good cassoulet and suspect he’d struggle to recognise this as one, but it is nonetheless good and hearty as a fresh soup pot.

Full-o-meter: Not bad. Better with more meat…

Verdict: 4/5. The first MPW soup properly worthy of the name. Suggest Mr White has a chat with the people at Glorious Foods swiftly…

Food

Marco Pierre White Glorious Moroccan tomato and chickpea soup review

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Description: “A Moorish tagine-style soup naturally thickened with chickpeas and couscous, finished with traditional spices and a hint of fruit. Glorious!” Again, their copywriters need to calm down.

Health: Not bad – about 390 calories for the pot, high fibre, low fat, but quite low protein too and reasonably high levels of sodium.

Taste: Bleh. I’m beginning to wonder if the addition of “-inspired” or “-style” to any description is an admission that they don’t really know how to spice the soup properly. This soup, whilst well-textured, is pretty bland and the absence of any proper spice or meat makes it a slightly tedious meal. In the interest of full disclosure I should confess that I gave up on it half way through and nabbed a passing sandwich from a lunch meeting I was in.

Full-o-meter: Not bad, was the impression I was getting before I lost interest…

Verdict: 2.5/5. Not getting the strongest impression of the MPW range…

Food

Marco Pierre White Glorious Indian chicken soup review

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Description: “A warming curry soup with tender pieces of chicken breast, red pepper, coconut cream and authentic indian spices, finished with coriander. GLORIOUS.” I think the descriptions writer got a bit curried [sic] away!

Health: 404 cals for the pot, which is OK, but low fibre, high sodium, middling protein makes this a bit average.

Taste: Less good than the first time I tried it, I think. The soup is a bit thin and suffers from the absence of a strong binding veg in there (some potato or some curried squash or even a few more lentils). The salt-level, whilst not overbearing in the taste, is headache inducing.

Full-o-meter: Not brilliant. Not thick and substantial enough without bread.

Verdict: 3.5/5. Downgraded on original verdict now that I’ve given it a full review.

Food

Sainbury’s ‘Taste the Difference’ green split pea and ham soup review

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Description: “A classic warming combination of green split peas and ham finished with double cream.” Yep, about right.

Health: Only OK – 406 calories for the pot, low in fat and sat fat, not quite so low in sodium, not great on fibre.

Taste: Standard – good, reasonably plentiful chunks of ham and bacon, a good amount of juicy pea, a rich, creamy soup base – there’s nothing not to like (assuming you have fondness for pea and ham). However… there’s nothing particularly interesting or exciting about it.

Full-o-meter: Eh, OK. You’d expect it to be better but the poor fibre content and relatively low protein score (it’s more a pea soup than a ham soup – and rightly so) means you’ll be hungry not too long after this (unless you have it with bread).

Verdict: 3.5/5. It probably deserves 4 but I’m just not inspired by it. I guess I’m not really a ‘classic’ soups guy – I like a bit of edge in my soups.

Food

Marks & Spencer green Thai spiced chicken soup review

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Description: “A blend of British chicken, Jasmine rice and water chestnuts in an aromatic Thai spiced broth.” Poor show on the chicken, and wish I’d noticed that it was described as “broth” when I bought it, which is an euphemism for “watery gunk.”

Health: OK-ish at 390 calories for the pot, but low on protein and fibre and relatively high on sat fat. Damnit.

Taste: Meh. Watery soup, absent chicken and the inexplicable presence of water chestnuts (which should not be present in anything, as far as I’m concerned) makes this pretty mediocre. Yes, it tastes of “green Thai spice” (whatever that is) but its correlation to green curry is as a McDonald’s chicken McNugget is to a whole roast chicken – distant and only recognisable once someone’s told you.

Full-o-meter: I suspect its going to be WEAK, given the poor textures and nutritional value.

Verdict: 1/5. My lowest rating ever. Seriously, M&S, even the ‘1’ is being charitable. You can do better.

Food

Marks & Spencer Moroccan style spiced chicken soup review

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Description: “A fragrant, lightly spiced chunky blend of vine ripen tomatoes, chickpeas, British chicken and red & green lentils.” Well, mostly right. It’s not lightly spiced, there’s about a metric tonne of cumin in there, but otherwise, about right.

Health: It’s OK – 390 calories for the 600g pot, v. low on sat fat (although reasonable about of actual fat), and obv. v. high on fibre.

Taste: Hrm. This isn’t the first “Moroccan chicken soup” I’ve tasted and IMHO this is inferior to both Pret & even Sainsbury’s attempts. Overkill on the spice front doesn’t make the soup spicy so much as heavy and sludgy and the tomato flavour is almost completely lost. That said, it’s “Moroccan style” and think it does serve as a kind of tribute; the consistency and textures (spicing notwithstanding) are otherwise OK and the chicken, chickpeas and lentils taste as you’d expect from M&S – good quality produce in action.

Full-o-meter: Very good. This is a heavy soup, it should keep you going.

Verdict: 3/5. Not bad, but simply not as tasty as other soups carrying a similar name. Won’t be high on my list to have again soon.

Food

Waitrose tomato, lentil & chorizo soup review

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Description: “A thick hearty soup of red lentils, tomatoes and chorizo seasoned with garlic, black pepper and smoked paprika.” Yep.

Health: Not bad, although heavy-ish for a pot this size – 422 calories for 600g. Low in sat fat, good amount of fibre.

Taste: I do like these Waitrose soups. Rich, thick red lentils, with a nice sharp tang from the tomatoes and a good amount of seasoning accompanied every now and then with a rewarding salty chew of chorizo. Yum.

Full-o-meter: Only had a half pot (with toast) but imagine this would keep you going for a reasonable amount of time.

Verdict: 4/5. A good one; more chorizo, more spice would have boosted the score (I like the spicy chorizo!), likewise a slightly lower calorie count. But a good option!

Food

Home made pizza

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Made delicious home-made pizza last night. Followed a recipe similar to this one for the base (minus the sugar and polenta) and this one for the sauce.

Delicious. Although as when making Roti Canai, I found that I couldn’t spread the pizza base easily without tearing it without quite a bit of olive oil. The end result was crisp, not too bready, and very tasty. In retrospect, a little brown sugar in with the pizza sauce might have added a nice sweetness (or maybe some red pepper, like the Domino’s guys have done with their redesign).

Amanda thought the balance was slightly out as the sauce was very rich and heavy and the crust very light – we could probably have addressed some of this by blitzing the chunky tomatoes or using passata instead of chopped tomatoes in the sauce. Might try that the next time.

Topped lovingly with chorizo, portobello mushrooms and low-fat mozzarella (diet ongoing, after all!). Recommended.