Sometimes all you need after a busy day or a long week is a Picky Tea. This might be a purely British meal, where you basically just grab a lot of food from the freezer and that’s your dinner. It usually contains things like chicken nuggets, maybe some spring rolls, a sandwich of left over deli slices. Is it nutritionally sound? Probably not. Does it bring instant comfort and make sure no food is wasted? Absolutely. With the cold of winter clearly here to stay for the next few months, these sorts of meals are brining me quite a lot of comfort after very manic work weeks.
I usually quite like the This Isn’t range: The meat alternatives tend to be quite simple but have a really nice texture and are a great addition to most meals. I tend to only use their chilled products, so this was the first time I had seen any frozen options available. Chicken tenders (like a chicken nugget but slightly bigger) are always a safe bet for a Picky Tea choice, so I grabbed some to keep in the freezer just in case the week got a bit too manic for full home cooking. So from a convenience perspective, these are clearly a good option.
Unfortunately I found these did fall quite short of the usually good This Isn’t chilled products. Perhaps because they are frozen, the actual meat inside loses a lot of it’s moisture and therefore a lot of it’s chewy texture, which means that these tenders were very dry and very dense. They absolutely need to be eaten with a sauce of some sort as they are very dry on their own. Perhaps they might work well in a katsu curry or perhaps even a stew?
Taste wise they don’t really taste of anything, which on their own is bad but does mean that they can be added to other meals without affecting any flavours. The bag did say that they were southern fried, but I didn’t get any flavouring at all. Again, this may because they are frozen so a lot of the flavour is removed whilst they cook, but these were very much unflavoured.
The whole packet cost me £2.50 at Tesco, and I got 7 tenders in the bag. I do like things to come in even numbers so it is easy to share between myself and my husband, but I do find with most packaged goods the number you get does tend to be quite random – No doubt if I was to buy another packet of these tenders I would get a solid 8, but in the bag after that I’d be back to 7. Not a major issue, but something to be aware of if you are hoping to share this out with a group of people. I also feel that whilst these are likely good to have on hand in the freezer for those days where you really don’t want to have to cook anything, but the chilled options from This Isn’t are far superior to the frozen. I would recommend maybe just sticking with the chilled options as much as possible, and maybe only get these for those emergency back up situations.
Taylor Talks Vegan 