Purchased today, at the extravagant discount price of $3.50(AUD) for one pot of lumlum Thai Green Curry flavour pot noodles. These are labelled as vegan, non fried noodles, no preservatives, gluten free, no MSG. Product of Thailand.

caveat: It's been a while since I've had two minute noodles, and I'm not entirely sure if I've previously had pot noodles, so I don't have a good reference to compare these to. Plus, while the instructions say 'leave for five minutes' I left for significantly longer, because I forgot about them. Which is to say that my upcoming complaint about the texture of the noodles may be entirely unwarranted.

So: prep - getting in to the packaging was a little frustrating, as if there was a perforated tear line in the sealing plastic I didn't find it. Similarly opening the flavour sachet. Not recommended for people with hand issues.

Flavour: there was a generous amount of flavouring paste, it smelled great, and it was sufficient for the amount of water added. I ended up drinking it all before eating the noodles, and as a soup it was wonderful. Definitely the bit that I would want again. Importantly for me, this was really good flavour, not passable flavour with lots of salt to make it feel like more flavour. 5 star flavour.

Noodles: These were uncanny valley levels of wrong. Slightly flat rather than round noodles, the mouth feel was slightly gritty (this is commonly my experience with rice based products). Even if they weren't overcooked, these two complaints would still be there. Impossible to scoop out with the fork - after drinking the soup, I just supped them from the pot. Grudgingly, I'm giving the noodles 2 stars, because of the user error involved.

Overall: worth it as a one off. I really needed something as a pick me up, and buying a treat at this price was worth it. I would not be buying it as a regular item, partly because I don't really like 'cup' noodles (I do like two minute noodles in the pressed blocks. Yes, I realise they aren't functionally different). If you like cup noodles and you find them at a reasonable price, then I think I recommend them. 3.5 / 5 stars.

ingredients: brown rice noodles (74%) (organic brown rice flour, water), Green curry flavour paste (26%)(coconut milk, cane sugar, cumin, chilli, salt, lemongrass, garlic, shallot, galangal, tumeric, soybean, coriander, lime peel, citric acid).

Over on my journal, I've typed up a recipe (with annotations) for Rosemary and Walnut Scones - this is a somewhat simplified recipe compared to the ones I've found in GF baking books.

Notes:

• It uses sorghum and maize corn flour, because those are my flours of choice. I assume as long as some amount of 'sticky' flour is included, they'll come together fine
• vegan option: replace the butter with oil; if I could get it I'd use macadamia oil; if I couldn't, I'd use rice bran oil.
• my jug measure is probably 1.5 cups total

This was bought in Western Australia, at my local IGA (supermarket), and the short review is: don't buy this.

The longer notes:

It was on the discount shelf, so it was $7.50 rather than $15, which is a thing that tempts me to try something new. It was labelled "Apple and Rhubarb Crumble, gluten free" and "400g" on the top (note: the company name is not there. I had to look in the fine print to find it). It was in an aluminium tray with a plastic lid, about the same size as a standard takeaway container. It looked like a reasonable size for two people to have generous portions, and three to have reasonable sized portions.

As there were no cooking instructions, I assumed it was ready to eat. I chose not to heat it up, because the oven would have been too hard, and the metal tray meant not in the microwave. This wasn't a dreadful mistake, but it was some amount of mistake, because the topping wasn't actually cooked. For people who like biscuit (cookie) dough raw, that would be fine, but I wasn't that enthused.

I reckon it was 80% topping. The fruit was almost entirely large chunks of apple. Neither the apple nor the rhubarb were cooked enough, so every now and then there was a crunchy bit. The rhubarb was also obviously stringy. The topping was at least felt to be more butter than it was sugar, so it wasn't horrendously sweet (although, given the ingredients list, this may have been wrong).

To add to all of these failures, I've just looked at the ingredients list: gluten-free flour, brown sugar, rhubarb, butter, cooked apple, baking powder. Obviously, the 'gluten-free flour' is a problem. But 'brown sugar' has to be a lie, no way that beautifully yellow topping had brown sugar in it. There was not more rhubarb than butter or apple.

If I have the energy, I'll go see if I can find the contact details for the company, and make a complaint.