Last Updated on September 18, 2017 by HodgePodgeDays
Although I like to cook from scratch as much as I can, there are times when I just want a night off and we treat ourselves to a ready meal. I’ve had some truly dreadful ready meals over the years, but I’ve also had some very good ones. We like to keep a couple of decent ones in the freezer for when I want a night off from the kitchen. We were asked to put the new range of Blue Dragon Frozen Ready Meals to the test, so what did we think?
My favourite take away is Chinese and I regularly cook Chinese style dishes or a stir fry at home. Blue Dragon is a brand name I recognise and I have several of their sauces and packets of noodles in my cupboard. We were sent the following Blue Dragon frozen ready meals to try out –
- Chicken Chow Mein with egg noodles
- Sweet Chilli Chicken with egg noodles
- Chicken in Black Bean Sauce with egg fried rice
- Sweet & Sour Chicken with egg fried rice
The new Blue Dragon frozen ready meals come in colourful packaging with a fairly good representation of what the dish looks like on the cardboard cover. The microwave cooking time for the dishes varies, but it takes less than ten minutes to cook and serve the frozen ready meal.
The meals are easy to heat up and the chicken is in a separate compartment to the rice or noodles. The noodles stand up slightly better to being frozen and reheated, as the rice was a little on the sticky side. We are very much a noodles instead of household, so that might sway our judgement.
The sauces appear to be the same Blue Dragon sauces that you’d buy in pouches to make your own meals from scratch, so they tasted quite delicious. There was plenty of sauce in each portion too, they were not skimpy with the sauce.
My first thought was, if you don’t like chicken you’re out of luck with these meals. Luckily my husband and son love chicken, and each meal had lots of nice chunky pieces of chicken and vegetables in them.
The meals are quite a good size and were enough to fill my two hungry boys after a long day at work and school. The meals were tasty and were popular enough for me to want to buy some more for lazy days. The boys favoured the meals with noodles as the texture of the rice was a bit sticky for their tastes.
A ready meal is never going to compare well with your favourite Chinese takeaway; but these Blue Dragon frozen ready meals are a decent approximation of what you might make at home. It would be nice to see more options than just chicken. It would be even nicer to see some vegetarian meals in this range, so we can all eat something similar together as a family.
Blue Dragon frozen ready meals are currently available for £2 from Tesco.
Thanks very much for the giveaway! x