Hello Fresh...ly Delivered Food Inspo to my Door!

We all know I enjoy having a go in the kitchen. Especially with sweet dishes. However, for the last few months we have been really lazy with our cooking and eating habits. The slightest thing to come up and it's , "Oh let's just do lazy pasta," which is pasta, pesto, spinach, cheese, hot sauce, and Quorn mince. It is something I lived on when I was on my own in the flat. Quick, easy, very little sustenance so if you had more than a single portion it was ok. When I moved in with Human*, we did really well to not have that every night and for a while I was even meal planning.

But with the move and the new job, it just became all too easy to be lazy. Plus, with how small our kitchen is now, the slightest bit of washing up on the side and there is just no room to cook. Honestly, my excuses go on for days and I seriously feel like a broken record. Don't have the spoons/time/energy/kitchen space... 

 

However, and this is a sparkly "however", Carole recently sent me an email with a code for a free Hello Fresh box. Now, if you have been living under a rock for the last five years, you'll be unaware that Hello Fresh is a subscription service where you pick from a selection of recipes each week and they send you everything you need - pre-portioned with a recipe card. I've toyed with the idea in the past but always found a reason not to - be it cost, laziness, or some other third thing.

 

Procrastating, as I do, I had a quick investigate of the email and what the code entailed. I am wary of things which claim to be free. Oftentimes, they are not as free as they might say. (I'm looking at you, phone call with Vodaphone where I could have a free iPad for £30 a month.) True to its word though, with this code I could get a whole box for free and just cover the postage and packaing. Ah, hello hidden cost. I was ready to click off until I stopped and thought about it.

The P&P was the same, regardless of box size. As a result, I could get a 5-meal box for 2 people, for £4. Urm, YES PLEASE!

As you can imagine, I signed right up with the intention to cancel after the first week. But the deals kept coming, and the food just looked so good. So it has now been four weeks and we are still Hello Freshing. We don't get the full five meals now, instead we bolster our meal plan with three Hello Freshes. The idea is to keep it up for a while, get a good stock of recipes we like and eventually stop the service and source ourselves. (I know, I see you laughing at our futile naivety. We'll still be on it in three years, no doubt.)

So far, we have had: burgers, rissotto, fancy grown up meals that I would never cook in a billion years, and Asian dishes that I definitely would have shied away from had I realised they had plum in them. And get us - we have even re-created the rissotto with what we had at home. I dug out some random venison from the freezer that I had found on the cheap, and it wasn't half bad!

Now, being the good little environmentalist that I am, one thing which had always put me off using something like Hello Fresh before was the sheer amount of packaging that comes with pre-portioned food. I need not have worried, though. Where possible, they use paper packaging, fruit and veg is loose, and it is mostly just the meat which is wrapped in plastic. All things considered, there is probably less plastic packaging in my box than in my weekly shop. Here is the meal we cooked prior to me writing this post, as it came in the paper bag.

Honestly, I am at the stage now thinking, why did I put off using this for so long?!

This meal was hoisin chicken with plum stir fry and rice. Bloody hell, it was lush. I did not even freak out about the fact there was plum in it - I trusted the Hello Fresh gods and they delivered. It was like having a proper meal from a Chinese restaurant. We have loaded wedges and roast chicken for later on in the week, for which I am very excited.

Just look at this meal. We are making food good enough to Insta.

Truly, I cannot sing praises enough for Hello Fresh. We finally have some variety back in our diet, I am excited for dinner again, and I am slowly stock piling enough stuffing to maybe even think about sewing again! (But that's a post for another day.) There's also the cheeky bonus that my friend who is moving soon can reuse the boxes for packing. Is there anything you can't do, Hello Fresh?!

Wait, I know. Stop us from being messy plebs in the kitchen.

Watching Human lean over the rice pan as it bubbled over brought back flash backs of those health and safety videos in food tech. Who let us turn thirty and be grown ups?

I am looking forward to picking next week's meals, and the week after, and the week after...! We've planned a little getaway in September, and you know our Hello Fresh box is coming with us. That is three meals we don't have to worry about, right there. Now, I must stop rambling or else I am going to make myself even hungrier.

*Previously known as the fella.