What's your best supermarket emergency microwave dinner

[CadburyCrunchy]

If you only had 35 minutes to spare between work and kids hobbies every Tuesday evening what would you cook for dinner in that time? I'm not a fan of ready meals but Tesco do an nice carbonara and one evening a week is ok! What would you suggest?

Lidl have a great selection of frozen ready meals.

The "what's cooking?" Range.

Great value and taste okay. We use them for packed lunches for the DC.

So might be a bit small for dinner. Have some crusty bread with them.

Pizzas. That's what we do every Wednesday in term time, when the kids have Activities. There's plenty of variety and takes like 10 minutes to cook. You can add some salad to make it more healthy.

Fried egg and waffles in toaster and beans and ham.

My oven heats up in three minutes so pizza (if that's still in the super-quick ready meal lane). I am a sucker for microwave mac and cheese - no-one else in the house eats it so I sometimes even have it (gasp) when I'm not in a hurry!! DS loves the M&S pasta with meatballs.

M&S Seafood Linguine, Sainsbury's stock Wasabi Sweet Chili and rice, and Sainsbury's duck in plum sauce. They're all lush.

Lidl in Ireland do a range called fit food. They have a nice chicken breast and chorizo in a tomato sauce with baby potatoes

Lidl do a lovely frozen macaroni cheese, the spicy one with jalapeño is gorgeous

In warm weather I wouldn’t bother with a cooked meal, microwave or otherwise. Sandwiches bulked out with some salad is surely fine for one night a week? You can always have a snack when you get home.

Tin of chicken in white sauce with micro rice. It reminds me of my student days.

I've yet to find a decent ready meal. Most tray lasagnes are really bad. The Costco one is ok.

Don't forget the pine nuts, freshly grated Parmesan, some Smokey salmon strips and a handful of rocket ... 🙄

Morrison's ready meals are by far the best, particularly beef casserole with dumplings - lush! I steam some cauliflower, carrots, sweetcorn and peas. So quick if I'm too tired or ill.

M&S macaroni cheese and ham and mushroom tagliatelle are both nice but in the pricey side.

I tend to have portions or bolognese/chilli in the freezer if I know I'm going to be short for time I defrost one during the day and have with microwave rice. Dinner is cooked in 4 mins

Weight watchers chilli with wedges.

It the fresh pasta tortellini with a tub of sauce. About 5mins to cook the pasta and the sauce heats up in about 2 mins.

I batch cook at the weekend so I’d just heat up a meal midweek. Alas, I’ve yet to find a good gluten free micro meal. I would quite like to find an unhealthy tasty quick midweek micro meal!

If I'm doing microwave ready meal then I usually go for lasagna or Mac n cheese, they're usually pretty failsafe.

We do 30 min meals most days though due to working FT and trying to squeeze eating in before bed. Favourite thing is to get the big trays of chicken breasts or pork loin steaks, break them into portion sized servings and put into a ziplock bag with some kind of marinade or seasoning (honey and mustard, coriander and lime, bbq sauce, sundried tomatoes, basil and olive oil, soy sauce, ginger and lemongrass) then freeze.

Night before stick the one you want to eat in the fridge.

Then when we get home put the oven on to heat, pour meat and marinade on a tray, on another tray add broccoli, cauliflower, green beans or corn on the cob. Add any seasoning and oil to the veg then cook the lot for 25 minutes in the oven.

Or chop it up and stir fry with a bag of noodles and stir fry veg for an even quicker cook.

Stir fry is a quicker overall turnaround but you have to attend to it while it cooks, oven version is 5 minutes of putting stuff in the oven then you get 25 minutes to do something else. Microwave meal is for the days when I need a quick turnaround and don't have time or energy to stir 😂

I've gotten in the habit of pre-baking about 6 spuds and having them in the fridge for a jacket potato. Beans and cheese I had last night. Tuna/May/sweetcorn takes about 2 minutes to mix together. I mix it whilst the potato is is reheating in the microwave. I know you asked for ready meals but it's pretty much ready!?

Tesco pasta ready meals used to be nice, but I grabbed a spaghetti carbonara last week and was really disappointed. The sauce was so thin, and there were about 3 pieces of ham in the entire dish. It had also gone up 50p. I wonder if they've reduced the quality to save money?

I’d just get a Deliveroo

My local lidl had packets of them at £1.25(?).

I use one of these to blitz an onion and peppers if I am stuck for time

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zyliss-Easy-Pull-Processor-White

Then I lob in some chicken and/or prawns and some frozen corn and peas to the Spanish(?) mix. You need to add 1/2 cup of water.

We have takeaways from time to time and I reuse the plastic tubs to batch cook and freeze bolognese and ragu. Likewise chilli. Lob some finely diced carrot and peppers and maybe some sweet potato if you are worried about veg intake.

I get the Aldi vegetable Red Curry 1 pot microwave meal (2 mins) and a sachet of microwave basmati rice (2 mins) and that tastes good and feeds 2 with minimal effort.

I just spent 6 weeks without a kitchen apart from a kettle and microwave, so I have had plenty of experience of ready meals this year. The only thing I would say first is that yes they are convenient, but when each one takes eg 8 mins, and you have 3 or 4 to do, your 35 mins doesn’t leave you long to eat it!
Anyway.. Morrisons lamb hotpot and veggie cannelloni were both lovely. Another couple of ideas for very quick meals would be the filled pastas with fresh sauce, the fresh pasta cooks in just a couple of minutes. Or pasta with pesto sauce. They are my go-to on the busy sports nights.

Lots of m&s ones are nice or the Charlie Bingham.

Or fresh pasta and a sauce takes minutes

Pick'n'mix- cold platter of cold meats/cheese/bread/fruit. Yum!
DH's family used to have "fruit dinner" once a week - loads of fresh fruit, bread and butter. They thought it was a treat!!