Lasagne

As I wind things down here in preparation for my summer break out of the UK, I find myself increasingly unavailable to cook meals from scratch. I hence have to resort to either eating out or buying ready meals to tide me over the times when I am at home. I thought that this would hence be an opportune time for me to explore the ready meals within the Sainsbury's Basics range.

Generally however, I avoid them. As I discussed with somebody who left a comment on my blog some time ago, the more processed a product is, ie, the more steps involved in manufacturing it, the more opportunities Sainsbury's will find to cut costs. They could skimp on the amount of ingredients, use cheaper substitutes, and in some cases, use fillers, as is the case with the Chicken Kiev, and the Low Price frozen mince I bought before Sainsbury's changed their budget branding to Basics. But that's a story for another time.

Of the several pasta meals that Sainsbury's carries, I decided to go with the lasagne. I can easily make most of the other pasta dishes from scratch, but making lasagne is a time-consuming and difficult exercise which I have yet to fully master.

The lasagne is thoroughly disappointing, severely lacking in beef content, which would explain why they are probably unable to label it as "Beef Lasagne". When supplemented with a salad and an orange however I was reasonably sated, so perhaps the tag line "Part of a complete dinner" would be pretty fitting.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Meat Lasagne	£0.74 or £2.98	300g or 1.5kg	+£1.16 for 400g, +£2.02 for 1.5kg	More substantial serving. Recommended