TRIED AND TESTED | M&S Healthy eating recipes

Far prettier than my pictures

When good old M&S asked us to test some healthy eating recipes all under 400 calories per serving we leapt at the chance. We’re both currently gym fiends and try to eat healthily in between meals out. The timing was perfect, we were Center Parcs bound which meant I could take the ingredients with me and wreck someone else’s kitchen instead of my own, and there would be a dishwasher, result. I hadn’t factored in small pans and blunt knives though, so the process was quite laborious at times.

Chicken n’ beans

First off was Spanish style chicken with cannellini beans. We’re massive fans of Nigella Lawson’s chicken cacciatore of which it shares some of the same ingredients. The M&S recipe tasted fresh and healthy but was missing a certain something. Perhaps it needed more seasoning or a squeeze of tomato purée – for colour as well as taste, passatta can give dishes a dull tinge compared to tinned tomatoes. However, my family who were fresh in from the first of many swimming trips polished it off. My sister-in-law even took the remains home to her villa, saucepan and all.

Veg curry

The Five vegetable curry with pineapple took ages to prepare, mostly down to the blunt knives as stated earlier. Cutting up butternut squash is never fun at the best of times, am surprised I didn’t end up in A&E with a severed hand. The sauce didn’t quite coat all the veg so it was lacking in flavour and a little too dry, had I been close to M&S I would have popped in for another jar.

Healthy recipes can be full of flavour, from tasting their ready meals (don’t judge me, you’ve all done it) I hoped for something more robust. With just a few instructions and easy to find ingredients, the recipes are certainly less taxing than others we’ve tried, am definitely going to give the turkey chilli a go.

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