Spontaneous Spice Nights Made Easy with ‘Spice Almighty’
As a student, cooking can be daunting. When you leave the comforts of your parents’ home-cooking, you definitely underestimate the amount of ingredients that go into a meal and how expensive it can be to fill up your cupboard. This doesn’t just include the food itself, but the base herbs, spices, and seasoning products you need to re-create your favourite curry need thinking about too. Alas, we lazy students can sometimes be put off experimenting with different dishes that aren’t Spaghetti Bolognese, or even worse… the infamous Pot-Noodle.
But fear not! It’s now time to throw the ready-meal away fellow non-cookers!
The lovely people at ‘Spice Almighty’ sent me a selection of their ‘Super Simple Spice Kits’ to try, they really do live up to their slogan. These dehydrated fresh spices really do make a meal, offering very minimal effort without compromising the authentic flavour. The selection I tried make beautiful curries, with names ‘Blisfull Balinese Fish Curry’ to a ‘Satisfying Singaporean Laksa’. You’d expect these kind of recipes to be too complex to choose for a quick fix after a long day at the library, but the ingredients list on the back really does only have around four other components to make a cracking dish, thus not breaking the bank.
These kits retail at around £2.50, it’s really reasonable, in each pack there is a sachet of ground spices and a sachet of whole spices. serving 2-3 people. Another thing I love about this selection is that it’s really versatile, another student kitchen habit is having to be creative with minimal ingredients (or knowledge), I wanted to experiment with the kits using only what I had in the cupboard. The ‘Joyful Japanese Spiced Coconut Vegetable Rub’ would obviously make a great veggie option, but I thought I’d try it with strips of chicken too, mixing peppers, tomatoes, red onion, butternut squash, and spinach with the chicken and cooking it all off with one of the spice packets. The meat stayed moist and tender, coated in the delicate heat of the spice blend and the creamy coconut flavour, the vegetables softened quickly absorbing the same taste.
The flavours are way more complex than i’d expected, ‘Spice Almighty’ have delivered in their effort to provide true Indonesian flavour, with no effort at all. The packets have a handy heat-indicator to let you know what level of spice each dish has to offer, making it super easy to mix it up and to suit everyone. My favourite kind of meals are the ‘chuck it all in and hope for the best’ kind, and with these affordable packets it’s always going to be a win, and you could always impress your flatmates with your new found ‘cooking’ skills!