This review contains the instructions you will need to take good food and ruin it. Tuna, pasta and sweetcorn in themselves are fairly bland but reasonably nutritious foodstuffs but by adding a sachet of sachet of Colman's tuna and pasta bake mix not only can you make a high calorie and salty meal but it will taste pretty awful too.

Colman's tuna pasta bake mix contains a dry mix of ingredients that you make into a sauce to add to nice fresh ingredients to make a meal. It's simple to make, you simply add the contents of the sachet to 3/4 of a pint of milk in a saucepan and after stirring well you add the fresh ingredients, bung it all in an oven proof dish before adding crisps and cheese and heating under a hot grill to crisp up the top and serve.

The sachet contains a pale pink powder with a strange artificial smell. When you add it to the milk, the mix turns a very strange colour indeed and has a strange gloopy texture with some flecks of green running through it. I think the sauce is meant to be a creamy tomato flavour but really I couldnt really taste any of those ingredients.

I think that Colman's have a bit of a cheek using the word bake in the name of this product, to me baking would imply cooking something in the oven not just crisping a topping under the grill. Baking implies a nice homely activity but this food is far from home cooked. The topping itself is a weird combo of crushed ready salted crisps and cheese, when heated under the grill this turns into a greasy yet crunchy mass on the top but is soggy underneath.

Add this nasty topping to a strange tasting salty and artificial mush undertneath and you do not have a nice meal at all. I bought the sachet because I remember cooking it when I was a student once and quite liking it, how my tastes have changed over the years. I thought it would expand the repetoir of meals which my fussy daughter would eat as tuna and sweetcorn are her favourite foods but she turned her nose up at it too.

When made up according to instructions, this meal was pretty horrible nutritionally too. A portion contains 504 calories which is 25% of an adult RDA so not terrible for a main meal. It also contains 34% of your saturated fat for the day and a whopping 35% of your sodium needs and and surprisingly for a savoury meal 11% of your sugar.

For the 79p that this sachet cost me, I could have a tin of tomatoes, a small onion, a clove of garlic, a teaspoon of mixed herbs and a chunk of pepper and make my own tomato sauce which would be low calorie, low sodium and delicious. I really don't understand why people buy these sauce mixes, home made is not that difficult most of the time and generally not more expensive either. A big thumbs down from me for Colman's Tuna and Pasta Bake Mix.