I was contacted last week by Anke at “Hello Fresh” asking if I’d like to try a Hello Fresh box of food for free and if I liked it, I could blog about it. The concept of Hello Fresh is that you receive a box of just the right amount of ingredients to make 3 meals (veggie or meaty) for 2 people or 5 meals (meaty) for 2 people. The ingredients are all weighed and measured for you and of the highest quality and come with recipe cards detailing exactly how to make the dish.
The upside is that you get just exactly what you need so are not left, for example, with the rest of the bulb of garlic or some herbs dying in the bottom of your fridge, as let’s face it, we all do! It is really convenient as there is no shopping to be done - it’s all delivered to your door in an insulated box, so if you want to cook healthy meals for yourself without having to trail around buying individual ingredients, then this is the box scheme for you!
To me, the price of the box is on the high side, but I am “Queen of the bargain”. However, I can see that for a lot of people, this price would not be high at all and in fact cheaper than ordering takeaway food or eating out. The fact that all the food is there for you ready to cook, is preferable to microwaving a ready-meal. And considering how much uneaten food is bought and wasted by British people, surely it is better to pay for quality ingredients and eat them, rather than spending the same amount on twice as much food then throwing half of it away!
The downside is that you have to have the box just as it is, whether you like the types of food or not, but to be honest, I like most things and love to try new recipes that I might not usually think of making.
Here are the meals with the recipe cards as I prepared them – they looked just like the pictures.
The 3 meals this week were “Ozone prawn and prociutto linguine”, “Roasted chicken with chorizo, pearl barley and cous cous salad” and “Smoked mackerel summer salad with green beans and new potatoes”.
The contents of the box as they arrived
I chose to make the prawn linguine first as I knew that my partner would have been very put out if I’d fed those king prawns to my mum (who shared the other meals with me)!!
The instructions for “Ozone prawn and prociutto linguine” were straight forward and easy to follow. I would have been good for anyone just starting out cooking meals as it is quite hard to time when to set the different parts of the meal cooking and these instructions give you all the timings. The meal was delicious and the ingredients were really good quality. The protion sizes were big – even by our bit appetite standards!
Here are some pictures I took whilst making the meal.
The ingredients for “Ozone prawn and prociutto linguine”
The chopping done
The meal, made in the pan
The two portions – very large!
Yum!
The next meal I made was the “Roasted chicken with chorizo, pearl barley and cous cous salad”. This had the same great quality ingredients and a large portion size. Although we did enjoy this meal, it didn’t have the same great zingy mix of flavours that the prawn dish had, and I didn’t really see the point of having pearl barley in the salad. I couldn’t tell the barley apart from the cous cous and it didn’t really have much flavour. I would have personally liked more red wine vinegar in this salad to make it a bit more flavoursome.
Here are the pics from this one.
“Roasted chicken with chorizo, pearl barley and cous cous salad”
The prep I had to do
I underestimated the size of the portions…
…and had to get a bigger bowl!
The huge portions
The last dish was ”Smoked mackerel summer salad with green beans and new potatoes”. We enjoyed this salad much more as it had more tasty flavours and it was more salad leaves rather than the cous cous and barley of the other salad. Again, the instructions were clear and simple to follow. This was the only one of the recipes that took me slightly longer to make than the instructions specified, but it wasn’t far out and didn’t really matter.
The pics!
“Smoked mackerel summer salad with green beans and new potatoes”
The simple chopping prep for this one
I used the big bowl first time for this one!
Again, lovely big, delcious salads
We enjoyed all the meals and can definitely see the benefits of ordering food in this way! Thank you to Hello Fresh for letting me try the food for free!
