This review is of the wonderful Spice Pots – Indian Spice Blends in a jar that I was sent to review from spicepots.com
I got to know of the company through twitter and asked if they would like me to review for them… and lucky for me they said yes!
I was sent a Spice Pots Gift Box and it retails at £12.95 usually but is currently on offer for £10.00. It is a lovely gift and would be ideal as a Father’s Day Gift ( which is on June 21st 2015) or indeed as a Birthday or , dare I say it, Christmas gift! 😀
The set contains 3 jars of Indian Spice Blend and they are as follows :- Korma Spice Pot (mild), Bhuna Spice Pot (medium) and Goan Spice Pot (hot). (Please note that the box contents can be customised to contain different spice pots but to do that you would need to email the company on info@spicepots.com to discuss)
Before I say much more about the fabulous Spice Pots I was gifted, please look at my lovely photos of the meals I created. I took step by step photos so that you could see how I went about creating the meals. The recipes for the Lamb Bhuna and Chicken Korma are on the Recipes page of the Spice Pots website. All you need to do is buy the ingredients you need, such as meat, coconut milk, ginger, garlic etc and then add the specified jar of spice blend.
The photo above shows the first steps I took to creating my Chicken Korma meal using the Korma Spice Pot and the photo below shows the rest of the process. I made up my meals (both the Korma and the Bhuna) on the hob in the slow cooker pots from my Morphy Richards Sear & Stew Slow Cookers that I treated myself to a few years ago. Once the ingredients were all mixed together and heated up to a high temperature I then transferred the bowls into the electric slow cookers so they could cook slowly for a few hours until they were cooked to perfection.
The Chicken Korma was made using a Korma Spice Pot and then I just had to add the following ingredients:- Boneless chicken thighs (although you could use fillet, if you prefer), natural yogurt, ginger, garlic, ground almonds (I had a bag of mixed nuts in the cupboard so took a handful of almonds out to process up and use in the recipe), oil, salt, onions and a tin of coconut milk (I bought Amoy Coconut Milk as it said ‘Rich and Creamy’ and it sounded yummy). All of these items are easily bought and a lot of the them are things you probably already have anyway.
In the photo below you can see how I made the Lamb Bhuna using the Bhuna Spice Pot. I bought a cheaper cut of meat and cut the lamb off the bone to use in the meal. I also added Tesco everyday value tomatoes and there was the option of adding curry leaves if I wanted. They are not the usual kind of spice that I have in my store cupboard so I would have had to buy them if I’d wanted to use them. Except in this case I had been gifted some from ‘Spice Kitchen’ as part of a spice set for me to review so I thought I may as well put them to good use and so chose to use them in my Spice Pots Lamb Bhuna Curry. The other ingredients I needed for the meal were oil, ginger, garlic, onions and a bit of salt. Nice and simple and not much needed to buy except for the Spice Pot, Lamb and the basic additions.
In the photo below you can see my two slow cookers on the go…both set to high ….and the empty Spice Pots in front of them. Spice Pots have since had lovely new branding and their jars and now bright and cheerful with vibrantly coloured labels. You can see a photo of them all at the bottom of the blog post. Don’t they look fab!
I cooked both of these meals at my house and then when they were ready I took them around to my mum’s house and we all had a lovely family meal together. One of my friends came too and she was very impressed with my culinary expertise! 🙂 She knew I had used the ‘Spice Pots’ and she loved how authentic the meals looked and tasted. To be honest, we were all astounded!! They looked just like meals we could buy from a take-away except I had a secret…..I knew just how easy they were to make!
The final photo from the collage shows my complete Indian meal that I made using my Spice Pots. For the purposes of a pretty photo I presented my Lamb Bhuna, Chicken Korma and Rice in my treasured enamel Tiffin Box that I was sent to review back in 2014 by Tiffinware (Here’s the review of the Tiffin Box). It all looked so delicious and it tasted delicious too! Everyone else ate their meal on a ‘normal’ plate but I ate mine from my Tiffin Box and I could see the envy in their eyes! 🙂 We accompanied the meal with naan bread , raita , mango chutney and poppadums that I had bought from Tesco.
It was such a pleasure to review these Spice Pots for my blog and I would like to highly recommend them to you all. Yes they are not as cheap as a £1 jar of cooking sauce that you can buy in the supermarket but the taste of them is completely different. You can taste the complex spice blends and get to enjoy yourself making the meals from scratch. I had never realised just how much spice blend goes into making an Indian meal…I thought a dash of this and a pinch of that was enough…I was wrong. A whole jar of spice blend is just right and when combined with yogurt or chopped tomatoes, etc it turns into an amazing marinade in which you can cook your meat. The bhuna was supposed to be a bit drier than how I made it but as I am fan of milder meals with lots of sauce I just added some water while it was cooking and added yogurt at the end. The Korma was fantastic and it was definitely our favourite as it was so tasty. It’s not that we didn’t like the Bhuna (because we did) , it’s just that the Korma was a meal we order most regularly from takeaways so to know that I had made this one all by myself (with the help of a Spice Pot) made it taste even better!
I gave the Goan Spice Pot to my sister so she could make a meal for her partner as I am not a fan of hot foods. She thought it sounded like a great idea to be able to buy a Spice Pot and have it in the cupboard so you could use it for an impromptu evening meal with an authentic Indian taste. The Goan curry recipe can be found on the website and there only a few basic ingredients required – beef, oil, salt, coconut milk, ginger, garlic, onion.
The Spice Pots can all be bought individually in jars from the Spice Pots website and they are £3.25 each. Each one contains 35g of spice blend. They also sell individual 35g refill packs that you can buy to refill your jar for the next time round and they are £2.45 per packet. As I mentioned earlier, the gift box contains 3 jars of spice blend and it is normally £12.95 but you can currently buy it online for £10.00. It is a wonderful gift set for any foodie and it is not something you find in your local supermarket. It would make an unusual gift that anyone who loves to cook would love to receive as a gift. It gets a big thumbs up from My Mummy Reviews! 🙂
Please pop by and have a browse of the Spice Pots website and sign up to the newsletter while you are there. That way you will always be kept up to date with the latest offers and new additions to the Spice Pots range. You can also follow the company on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
Melanie is the lady behind Spice Pots and you can read all about her inspiration for starting her business here. She is ever so friendly and very kind too. It was lovely of her to send me the Spice Blends to review….Thanks Melanie! 🙂
The Spice Pots are all handmade in East Lothian and she regularly donates money to help SLA (Scottish Love In Action). Scottish Love in Action (SLA), is a charity based in Edinburgh, Scotland that cares for over 500 destitute children in the East Godivari District of the State of Andhra Pradesh, South-East India. They do this by funding a Home and School in Tuni. You can read more here.
If you decide to buy a Spice Pot….Have Fun Cooking!
Buy Spice Pots online from www.spicepots.com or from one of these stockists.