It has become somewhat of a tradition in our house in recent months to share a big family roast dinner together and this weekend we have been joining in with the celebrations at Knorr HQ with our own 'roast dinner of the year' to celebrate Knorr's Gravy Pots having been awarded Product of the Year in the Gravy and Stock category.
Knorr sent us the starter kit for an award-winning family roast dinner along with some of their innovative Gravy Pots which come in a number of flavours such as Beef Gravy, Chicken Gravy and Onion Gravy. I then let the girls choose all of the trimmings that they wanted - the overwhelming winner was some of my homemade oil-free Yorkshire puddings which, thanks to the joys of stoneware, I now seem to have mastered.
Our weekly gathering for a family roast is always the highlight of my week. I will admit that I very rarely make gravy from scratch... perhaps once a year maybe. This is mainly because I struggle to create enough cooking juices to warrant a home-made gravy. Usually I opt for granules but Knorr's Gravy pots promised me that they would taste more like homemade gravy than instant options would.
I used my beef gravy pots in a hurry (we had a visitor arrive just as I was serving dinner!) but even so, I found them a very useful middle-ground between the efforts required for home-made gravy and the instant-gratification of granules. You have to heat the Knorr gravy pots through in a pan of water until it comes to the boil. I struggled to get them to fully dissolve because of the hurry I was in but I still found it about 200% easier than trying to mix flour with meat juices and trying to thicken a gravy manually (I always make lumpy gravy).
The girls loved the gravy. Mr. B. felt it wasn't gloppy enough for him (sigh) but I certainly thought it tasted a lot closer to home-made gravy than our normal brand.
Our celebratory roast dinner was washed down with a glass of Cotes du Rhone and finished off with some homemade chocolate chunk cookies that the girls cooked with me. I can't think of a finer way to finish off a weekend.
