Sunday 10 October 2010

Aunt Bessie's Food Review and Competition: Win an IKEA Kitchen

When I was offered the opportunity to spend £5 worth of vouchers on Aunt Bessie's food products with the added challenge of coming up with an interesting recipe using Aunt Bessie side dishes, I didn't need much persuasion. I like a culinary challenge and the Aunt Bessie food range is always quite enticing. We wandered to the shop and bought ourselves some dumplings, Yorkshire puddings and an apple crumble, then set about designing ourselves a recipe for today's lunch. We decided to freeze the dumplings for another day when we will make a hearty vegetable stew to accompany them and designed a recipe using the Yorkshire puddings.


We have loads of vegetables from the garden at the moment and in particular loads of squash so I used this as my base for choosing our final recipe and with duck currently on special offer in the supermarkets we opted for Shredded Duck with toasted pine kernels and roasted squash, served inside Aunt Bessie Yorkshire puddings. To accompany the meal we added boiled potatoes from the garden and lots of gravy. And even though I made it myself I can quite honestly say it was delicious.

We prepared and cooked the duck according to the package instructions. Once it was in the oven we were free to chop the squash into small pieces. We used gemstone squash and a variety of marrows but you could use any variety of squash at all. Pop them in the oven with which ever herbs take your fancy (we used some rosemary) and roast till they're ready. Toast the pine kernels in a frying pan and then when you have removed the duck from the oven and let it rest awhile put the Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire puddings in for four minutes. This is just enough time to make a gravy with the duck juices and shred the duck. Mix the ingredients together and season to taste, then dish up and enjoy.

Everyone finished the entire meal and Garden Girl even asked for second helpings so it was definitely considered a tasty meal all round. I have to admit that we usually like to make our own Yorkshire puddings, but for this particular recipe the oven was full with the duck and roasted squash so we wouldn't have managed to get everything ready on time if we hadn't used Aunt Bessie's ready made ones and they really did taste great so I will certainly buy them again and I am looking forward to trying the dumplings in a few weeks.

We rounded our Sunday lunch off today with an Aunt Bessie's apple crumble which Garden Dad was pleased to see included oats in the crumble. There was lots of apple and it tasted great but it only just served the four of us and with two portions being for children I'm not convinced it was big enough for a family of four with older children and certainly wouldn't stretch to feed a larger family.

As part of their current promotions Aunt Bessie's are also running a fabulous competition to win an IKEA kitchen. To find out the full terms and conditions and to enter the competition (open to residents of Great Britain only) just follow the link below:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;230446492;54993899;d

Good luck!

No comments:

Post a Comment