Dinner For One (Birds Eye Roast Beef Dinner)

Member Name: wigglylittleworm

Product:	Birds Eye Roast Beef Dinner
Date:	18/02/08 (317 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy

Disadvantages: Soggy Yorkie

Why I Bought This Product

I'm not generally a fan of ready meals, but I was home alone one night so picked this up at the shop as it seemed like an easy option for dinner.


What Is It

Birds Eye Roast Beef Dinner is a frozen ready meal. The packaging says that it has silverside of beef, delicious meaty gravy, yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and vegetables.


Price

I bought it in a special price marked pack for £1.99. It generally retails around £2.29 and is widely available in the freezer section of supermarkets and convenience shops.

Cooking

Simply take the meal out of the box and cook for 35 minutes in the oven at 170 degrees. Alternatively, cook in the microwave for 7 minutes. I chose to cook it in the oven.


Appearance

The meal comes in a black plastic tray split into two sections. One section contained 4 smallish roast potaoes, the other contained the beef, yorkshire pudding, gravy, peas and carrots.


Taste

There were four smallish roast potatoes. They were a bit pale and floppy on the outside but were nice and fluffy inside. They tasted a bit dry to me, but were not too greasy which was good.

The yorkshire pudding was disappointing. It cooked in the gravy so was very soggy on the bottom and hard at the top.

The beef was really nice. There were four generous slices of thinly sliced beef. It was nice and moist and had a good meaty flavour.

The gravy was a bit bland, but there was a generous portion of it.

I'm fussy about my vegetables and I normally refuse to eat frozen at all. There was a huge portion of peas, some of them looked a bit dehydrated and dried out, but they tasted ok, if a bit sweet. There were four baby carrots which managed to be both waterlogged and undercooked at the same time.


Nutrition per cooked meal

Calories 410
Sugar 5.1
Fat 12.0g
saturates 4.4g
Salt 1.4g

The meal contains one of your daily portions of fruit and vegetables.


My Verdict

It's certainly not as good as homemade, but it's ok and reasonable value for money. I think it's one of the better ready meals out there. The 340g portion size was generous, and despite it being my first meal of the day at 6pm, I struggled to finish it. I'm not going to rush out and stock up on these, but may well pick one of these up again if I ever need a quick meal idea. It's certainly cheaper and healthier than a takeaway.

Summary: A quick meal