I don’t shop at Aldi as much as I do other supermarkets. This is mainly because it’s a little further away, but I do go when I can as I find many things cheaper than other places.
I was asked by Aldi recently to create a recipe using only products bought from an Aldi store. And that’s just what I did, in fact I made two.
The first is a healthy salmon pasta salad. I made it with pasta from Aldi along with all of these lovely ingredients (also from Aldi)
It is one of those recipes where you can pretty much put anything you like with it but this is what I use.
Pasta shells, salmon flakes, 1 pepper (red), 1 medium onion, 1 avacado and a tub of prawn cocktail.
It’s a simple recipe and perfect for more Summery weather and Bbq’s but I enjoy it any time.
So to make the dish: I boil the pasta until soft (about 10 mins). Chop the pepper and onion. Slice the avacado. Once the pasta is cooked and cooled I add the salad items.
And then in goes the salmon and a little mayonnaise or salad cream, just so it’s not dry.
Then serve with the prawn cocktail at the side. I think the salmon with prawns goes really well and the salad items make it quite a colourful dish too. It really is tasty.
Next is a more traditional dish – Chicken roast dinner; and again all the ingredients are purchased from Aldi.
The chicken is a roast in the bag “extra tasty” type. These save mess and greasy hands plus contamination as the bird stays in the bag until cooked. The bag does not even need piercing. The whole thing simply goes onto an oven tray and cooks and any fats get caught in the throw away tray that the bird comes in.
To make things easier for mums just like me, Aldi has a really good selection of frozen prepared vegetables. They do of course have many fresh vegetables to offer too but the frozen bags just seem to make dinner much easier as the hard work and mess is eliminated (washing, peeling, chopping etc)
They also have a few varieties of ready made Yorkshire puddings. Izebella loves them and ends up making little pies with them. The bag above cost less than 50p and they tasted just as good as any other.
The frozen mash is great, again no peeling, chopping, boiling or mashing spuds as it’s all done for me. I just tip the frozen potato pieces into a bowl and microwave for about eight minutes, adding butter or milk to the dish gives it a more creamier flavour. It’s nothing like that awful instant powder mash either it’s simply frozen potato.
And we all enjoyed a lovely hot roast dinner. I won’t call it a Sunday dinner because we didn’t have it on a Sunday and I believe that good roast dinners can be enjoyed any day.