I am sure that you have seen the ads on various medias- for only “x” amount of dollars you can have a fresh meal delivered to your doorstep! We have been intrigued by this service, but never really wanted to spend the money to try it out. After the new year though, we found a deal so we decided to give it a try. So here is the scoop on what we thought.
I am the main chef in our household, and though I love to cook, sometimes I am overwhelmed by the whole process. What should I make? Will everyone eat it? How much time will it take? And then when I feel like we are doing great with meal prep, we tend to get stuck on the same things. So when we started up with the home delivery service Hello Fresh, it was nice to be able to look at the options and choose one that we thought would appeal to most of the family (can’t please them all!) and would be a bit healthier for us adults.
I will have to admit, when our first box arrived on our doorstep I was pretty excited. Everything was packaged nicely inside. The service ships two meals at once, and each meal was individually bagged, with the meat in a separate, sealed package. The ingredients were fresh, and the packaging that the whole thing came in was recyclable.
Each meal came with a large recipe card, which showed the steps to make the meal, as well as how long it takes to prep and cook the meal. The recipe card did a great job of ordering the steps, so that you knew which thing to prep first so that the timing of all the components came together at the same time. The steps were easy to follow, and not too complicated in terms of level of cooking skills.
Some friends that I have talked to were unhappy with how much “prep” they still had to do with these types of services, but I was not bothered with having to chop, slice and grate some of the ingredients. If this is a deal breaker for you though, check into how ingredients are shipped when looking into a meal delivery service.
We did the home delivery service for about a month, and each week we were very pleased with the meals that we made. There were several meals that we all enjoyed as a family, just by not adding the “sauce” to the chicken, or the extra spices to meal. The sides that we prepared were nothing super extraordinary, so the whole family enjoyed the roasted green beans, potatoes, etc. My children even got excited about mashed sweet potatoes because there was HONEY in them (game changer) and they gobbled them up.
One of the things that I didn’t like about the service was the waste in terms of packaging. I love my planet, and try my best to recycle as much as I can. For the meals, everything is the exact quantity that you need- which equates to lots of little plastic pouches that cannot be recycled. On the flip side, when you are cooking a specific meal that requires very specific ingredients, it was nice to get the exact amounts needed instead of buying a whole jar of, say, fish sauce that I might never use again. The recipes are also not super healthy, BUT if you are at all savvy in the kitchen you can definitely adjust the recipes to make healthier versions of them in the future.
Overall we were impressed with the recipes and the food was really delicious. It was a great thing to do for a short period of time, to get new recipe ideas and to mix things up a bit. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
