Happy Monday, friends! Ben and I had the chance to try our first Hello Fresh box a few weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to tell you about it. Have you heard of this meal delivery service phenomenon? You go online to choose your recipes for the week (three, in our case), and then a lovely box, full of fresh, perfectly portioned ingredients, plus recipe instructions, magically appears on your front doorstep. (Wingardium leviosa!?)
It’s pretty neat.
(The box comes with lots of insulated packaging, so the ingredients stay cool, which is definitely great for the ingredients but possibly bad for the environment?)
The recipes we chose (the choices change weekly) were the tortellini kale gratin, Thai beef and carrot noodle salad, and bbq chicken sliders. The ingredients for each recipe were portioned out in their own, clearly-labeled boxes, which took any guesswork out of identifying which ingredients went with which recipe. To be honest, opening the little boxes to find the neat, perfectly labeled packages of carrots, concentrated chicken stock, Parmesan cheese and tabasco really lit up my check-box-oriented brain. Is that sad?
It turns out that I can be a bit of a boss-lady in the kitchen (WHAT?!?), so Ben helped me loosen my apron strings by taking on the challenge of cooking most of the recipes entirely on his own. I bit my tongue on Thursday, when he used the incorrect cutting board for the chicken, and again on Sunday, when he put the peeler back in the wrong drawer (I MEAN…the horror), but on the whole it was pretty blissful to sit back and let someone else deal with dinner. As someone who doesn’t do much cooking, Ben found the recipes easy to follow and relatively quick. Best of all, they were tasty!
The tortellini dish was meat free, but quite hearty and generously portioned, so it lasted us two meals. The chicken sliders with tangy cole slaw got gobbled up in one sitting, and the Thai beef salad didn’t last long enough to get photographed. Oops.
On the whole, I was pretty pleased with our first Hello Fresh meal delivery experience. The meals are simple, nutritious, tasty, and pretty affordable (it comes out to about $10 per person per meal, depending on which box you choose), but I think the best part is the fact that the service takes the uncertainty and guess work out of (often hectic) weeknight dinners. For three nights, we avoided the inevitable, tired question: what’s for dinner? It was nice not having to grocery shop, or worry that I forgot certain ingredients, or feel stuck in a dinnertime rut.
My only hesitation about making Hello Fresh a more regular routine in our household is the amount of packaging that one little box seems to contain. Because on the one hand, it’s helpful to have everything individually wrapped and labeled, and much of the bulky packaging is used to help insulate the box and keep it cool (which is definitely necessary), but on the other hand, I’m tryina keep it green(ish), y’know?
What do you guys think? Would you ever try a meal delivery service?
Thanks to Hello Fresh for providing us with a complimentary box to test out. All opinions here are my own.