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Hello Fresh Meal #11

The ingredients:

This recipe included cilantro intended just to be a topping on the finished product. I do not like cilantro so I just eliminated it. This meal also included something called Mirepoix which was a bag of pre-chopped carrots, celery and onions. This is one spot where HF made it easy by precutting those and mixing them together - in terms of me reproducing this recipe that is extra work that HF has done for me. This one comes with Lean Ground Beef - I would do it with Beyond Meat ground.

The final product:

I very much like curry and was very pleased with this recipe. That the Mirepoix would require some extra work on my part I'm not too concerned about. This is a kind of meal I would make a big batch of with quite a few leftover meals frozen.

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Earlier this week arrived the fourth Hello Fresh box for which I paid 78.93$ so with nine meals it comes to 8.77$ per serving. This is now the full price with all previous ones having been discounted.

Hello Fresh #10:

The Ingredients:

The finished product:

I quite enjoyed this meal; one thing I would change is to not bother zesting the lemon and just squeeze the lemon slices to have the lemon flavour seep into the meal after it is already served. The feta and pesto on top really added a nice flavour but in my third eating of this meal I forgot to add them and it was still almost as good; so in a pinch I could leave out the feta and pesto.

I am definitely keeping this recipe.

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 Hello Fresh Meal #9

The Ingredients:

The small packets from left to right: Turkish Spice blend, Smoked Paprika Garlic blend and Panko. I did not know what panko was before making this meal; I have learned it is a fine version of breadcrumbs that were used to be be incorporated into the ground meat.

The finished product:

Okay so the salad part of it was okay; the dressing that was made, a combination of white vinegar, olive oil, and a bit of seasoning made the salad a little too liquidy; if I was to do this in the future I would add the salad dressing to the salad, rather than adding the salad into the bowl of salad dressing. I added some chopped green onions to the salad that didn't come with the HF ingredients since I had them on hand.

You will note that on my plate there are only two meat balls while on the Hello Fresh there are three; this is because I divide the recipe of two meals into three as previously noted. This was lamb meat and it was okay; if I was to do this recipe again I would see about using Beyond Meat ground.

My potatoes ended up darker than theirs; I think I let them bake a bit longer than they should have. They were still good, however, they didn't taste burnt.

Finally, the dip aside from the plate was a nice combination with the meat Koftas.

All in all it was an okay recipe, but I won't be keeping this one for future use; it was too cumbersome in terms of keeping aside both the dip and the salad in terms of eating this as a left-over meal the subsequent day.

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Hello Fresh Meal #8

Ingredients

There is unsalted butter in the upper left corner that didn't come with the meal kit but was supposed to come from my pantry. Other pantry items they expect you to have is salt, pepper and oil; the latter of which I generally use olive oil. Though this recipe doesn't call for it, I'd have added onions, chopped and fried a little part way through the recipe to be included.

Final product

I'm not certain I liked this meal enough to have it as one that I would attempt in the future outside of HF deliveries. There is a cream that gets added to make a cream sauce the mixes in with the pepper and chicken and it was very liquidy with most of it remaining in the pan where I cooked it rather then being incorporated into the meal. I suppose I will keep the recipe for now and see if there is a way I can increase the viscosity of the sauce. It did have going for it that it was easy to separate into future meals and reheating it.

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Today arrived the third Hello Fresh box and the last one that includes a beginner discount, I paid 68.93$ so with nine meals it comes to 7.66$ per serving.

Hello Fresh #7:

Ingredients:

Yes, a package of mushrooms in the bottom left. I do not like and do not eat mushrooms, so I did not incorporate them into the recipe as instructed. Now I just need to figure out what to do with them; or rather, who to give them to. To the right of the mushrooms at the bottom is, yet again, Italian seasoning. This seems to be very common in the HF recipes. For the bacon, it was four strips to make the three servings.

Final product:

It was a hit, my daughter V-8 quite enjoyed it; as did I; the bacon on top was a nice treat.

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Hello Fresh meal #6:

Here are the ingredients:

At the bottom right corner, the yellow is something they called 'Chicken Salt', to the left some Italian seasoning and above the yellow two packets of Chicken Broth Concentrate.

Here's the final product:

This was a really good one; the Arborio sticky rice with spinach and peas mixed in was fantastic. For the first plate I cut the chicken the way the recipe called for; in long strips. For the remaining two left over meals I cut the chicken into bite sized pieces and just mixed it in with the rice; this made it easier for reheating. Reheating it was just as good.

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 Hello Fresh meal #5:

Here are the ingredients:

The two dark green pouches at bottom center are concentrated vegetable broth, then to the right of that is chipotle seasoning and then Mexican seasoning which smells very similar to Epicure Selections Taco seasoning. The carrot was a little wilted and I'd have put two carrots into this. I used my mini food processor to chop nuggets of carrot to be very granular. I had garlic left over from a previous meal and while the recipe did not call for garlic, I garlic pressed four cloves early on into the recipe. Lots of health benefits for garlic. The cheese provided I ended up using all of it for three quesadillas, half of what was available to be made in terms of the tortillas. This is the first miss from HF; or, perhaps I put too much cheese. I will go to the grocery store to buy some more cheddar before I make the quesadillas again.

Here's the final product:

I quite enjoyed this meal and there is little I would change about the recipe. I also liked having the quesadillas to go along with it and it reminds me that quesadillas are pretty easy to make just to have them on their own. The recipe easily stretched into three meals, though I didn't think it quite through and ate half of the quesadillas rather than a third. 

So far out of all of the meals there are a number of items that I would find using Epicure Selections; as noted above for this meal there is Taco seasoning for the Mexican seasoning. There is also Vegetable broth that could come from Epicure, and from other recipes there is Italian seasoning.

I am not certain yet what the full cost of HF meals will be as I still have one more delivery that is from a starter coupon; but I am really quite curious to see how this will compare with me buying the ingredients myself. One thing that I would save is HF's 10$ delivery fee that I would pay for by the time it takes to walk to and from the grocery store. Another thing that is possible is that some food that I buy may go to waste as compared to where what HF sends, it all gets consumed. I suppose if I pay particularly close attention to this facet I might do okay.

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I recently received my second box of Hello Fresh but before I get to that, the third meal I prepared of the first box gave me three servings instead of two. This means that due to the deep discount first box having used a beginner coupon each of the seven meals worked out to 4.13$ each.

For the second box there was a smaller discount, I've prepared and consumed the first meal and already I have found I could split it into three servings instead of two. Given this, I'll divide the total amount I spent for this box (58.93$) by 9 servings, which comes to 6.55$ per serving.

Hello Fresh meal #4:

Here are the ingredients:

The ingredients included two chicken breasts that I suppose was intended to each be one serving, but I split the two breasts into three servings. Along the bottom from left to right is Italian seasoning, balsamic glaze and pesto.

Here's the final product:

I quite enjoyed this meal and it worked well for when I had my girls with me, I prepared three plates identical to this one and we all ate well. V-8 complained about the tomatoes and onions but otherwise both girls said they enjoyed it. If I was making this simply for myself, I don't think it would be a good option as having leftovers of each of the three components would be cumbersome to manage

The recipe called for using only half the onion and did not put to use the second half; if I was to do this on my own, I would simply use the whole onion.

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 Hello Fresh meal #3.

Here are the ingredients all unpacked:

The small packs:

From left to right, Crumbled Feta, Mexican Seasoning, Chipotle Chili Powder and Enchilada Spice Blend.

Here's the final product:

I had some garlic left over from one of the previous meals, so I garlic pressed four cloves into the pan early on in the pan frying step of frying the onions and peppers. I quite enjoyed this recipe and I got three meals out of it instead of two. I would stretch it even further by adding a packet of Beyond Meat ground up, frying it first, taking it out, then frying the garlic, onions and peppers, and then adding the BM ground along with the tomatoes and beans for the simmering part. Note that the recipe called for baking the chips after having seasoned them with the Mexican Seasoning; I did not bake the chips and in the future wouldn't have chips with the meal. I would cook rice to go with this meal and then it could be four or five meals.

So out of the first three HF meals, two of them I am keeping. My next HF delivery is on Wednesday next week.

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Hello Fresh meal #2:

Here are the ingredients all unpacked:

The two small packs:

The left one is Jerk Spice blend which is used to douse the Beyond Meat burgers and the right one is Cumin-Turmeric blend that was used to douse the potatoes.

Here's the final product:

I liked the seasoning on the Beyond Meat burger and the seasoning on the potatoes too, but everything else about this meal I wasn't particularly enamoured with. The mango salsa would have gone better if I had cut it into smaller pieces, the sauce beneath the burger was okay, but not terrific; but mostly, this is a difficult meal to set aside the second serving for a later meal. The first Hello Fresh meal I made was easy to scoop the second serving into a container I could put in the fridge for eating the next day.

So what I will take from this recipe is the idea of seasoning the Beyond Meat burgers and the potatoes but all the rest of the recipe I will not reuse.

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I signed up with Hello Fresh, two portions, three meals, every other week. With beginner coupon, these first three meals, including shipping and taxes, cost 28.93$ which works out to 4.82$ per meal.

Here is the first one I picked to make:

The delivery comes in a fully recyclable box (no compound materials) and includes two ice packs at the bottom as well as ~5mm thick corrugated insides on all six sides to act as insulation. I do not know if the ice packs are purely water frozen, or if there is anything else to it; for now I just put them in my freezer.

The ingredients for each of the three meals comes in its own paper bag; this next photo shows that bag behind all of the ingredients provided for this meal:

It is nice that the garlic, green pepper and onion are just loose like that and not wrapped up uselessly in plastic. The three flat pouches on the top right are these:

To the left, crumbled feta, in the center Italian seasoning and on the right some thick cream.

I followed easily the provided instructions; it said it ought to take 25 minutes. I did not time myself but probably I took a little bit longer. Of all of the tasks I had to do to prepare the meal, cutting up the chicken thighs into pieces was the one I found the least pleasant. I think if I had a better knife it might have gone better.

Here are all of the ingredients having been cooked and put together into the pot as the final step before serving:

And here it is served with the feta sprinkled on top:

I quite enjoyed this meal and would be happy to prepare it again. It isn't clear that I could get this down to 4.82$ per meal if I bought all of those ingredients and made it outside of Hello Fresh; however, the price per meal beyond this beginner coupon probably brings the Hello Fresh and my own grocery price much closer. If I was to make it, I would also probably double or more the recipe so that I could make and freeze multiple meals of it, rather than just two. Doing this ought to make it easier to use grocery store ingredients.

So my idea is to stay subscribed to Hello Fresh for a few months and get used to preparing meals, picking out ones that I would be happy to make again, and then I would eventually cease the subscription, but continue to make use of the recipes.