Skip to main content

Fresh Food

I was going to post something more thoughtful this week.  But... it's been a long day.  I got a grand send-off to work this morning; all three boys waving from the front door.  Which was very heartwarming - except that I leave at 6:30 am and really they should have all still been in bed!  Then I got back from work, and we had to run some errands and feed everyone and stop Toby and Theo from arguing and put them to bed and you know.  All that stuff.

I'm waaalkiiiing!

But at least dinner has been easy for the last three days.  Our latest impulse buy was a deal on a three-meal box from HelloFresh.  The idea is that they pack up the ingredients for three recipes, add in the cooking instructions, and deliver the whole lot to your door in a carefully insulated container.  Full price, as you might expect, it costs only a little less than our usual week's shopping bill, but with the offer it was relatively affordable.  About the price of a dinner out, for all three meals.

So.  Our box arrived, and we dug in.  All the food was fresh and in good condition.  The "exact quantities" of ingredients seemed a bit variable, though.  There were cute little tiny bottles of rice vinegar to add to the prawn stirfry, but then there was a 250g bag of spinach to put into the pitta breads with our Moroccan-style burgers.  Hmmm.  It's not as if fresh spinach keeps well, either.

The recipes were definitely tasty.  We are fairly adventurous eaters anyway, so they didn't strike us as being too out of the ordinary, but they had a good mix of flavours and were healthy and quick to prepare.  They also included a couple of ingredients that I'd heard of but wasn't sure I wanted to buy a whole packet: rose harissa paste and dukkah spice mix.  It was a bit of a treat for us to eat prawns, beef and chicken on consecutive days - all from highly-regarded suppliers, apparently - and the three-person quantities were more than adequate for two hungry adults and two picky little 'uns.

And I didn't cook a single one of those dinners!  Graham usually lets me get on with the cooking, but I think he found the step-by-step recipes and labelled ingredients very approachable.  He certainly had no trouble producing the desired result!  I got the impression that the company's target customers are people who never really learned how to cook, work fairly long hours, and have enough disposable income to grab a takeaway several times a week.  If that is the case, I think it works very well.  For us, it was far too expensive to consider doing every week, and the recipes were basically spruced-up versions of stirfry, burgers and chips, and chicken with (sweet) potatoes and veg.  Good, but not super-special.

For a one-off treat?  Definitely.  And thanks for the recipes.  As a regular part of our diet?  I think we're good enough cooks not to need such a tailored approach.  HelloFresh... and goodbye.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

National Forest Way: The End!

The National Forest Way finishes at Beacon Hill, Leicestershire, with beautiful wide-ranging views in all directions. I'd been hoping for a sunny day, and this one certainly fit the bill. The frosty earth lay under a glorious canopy of shining blue sky. I parked at Swithland Wood, close to where we finished the previous walk. Finding the waymarker on the first gate was bittersweet - this was the last time I would be following these familiar circles.   Swithland Wood had been acquired by the Rotary Club in 1931, and later passed on to Bradgate Park Trust. The lumpy terrain was due to slate quarrying. I skirted a couple of fenced-off pits. As I left the wood, I passed a lake which I assumed was another flooded quarry, but with an odd little tower next to the water. I followed a road up a steady hill towards Woodhouse Eaves. Many of the houses were surrounded by walls of the local slate. Woodhouse Eaves was a prosperous-looking village with some nice old buildings. Crossing the wide ...

Trent Valley: Nottingham

Five churches, four bridges over the Trent, three stocking fillers, two pubs, one castle, and about ten million fallen leaves. It was a packed walk today. Queens Drive Park & Ride is officially for people getting the bus into town, but there's a little bit at the back marked "Overflow Parking" which had a handful of cars in, so I parked there and snuck out through the tunnel. Bridge number one was Clifton Bridge, again , in all its multicoloured glory. The River Trent was swooshing along after the recent rain, beautifully framed by autumn leaves under a grey but thankfully dry sky. The cycle path took an abrupt left to run alongside the road for a short stretch. Then I approached bridge number two, the Wilford toll bridge, also known as Halfpenny Bridge. Sir Robert Juckes Clifton, who built it, has his statue near the old toll house. He was surrounded by grazing geese. Wilford toll bridge Sir Robert and the toll house Next there was a long sweep of grass with a line o...

Austin part 2

Well, I wrote about Bats, Bluebonnets and Breakfast Tacos in a previous post, but that only seemed to cover about half of what we actually did in Austin (were we really there only for a weekend?). And we had several more great photos that Graham has been bugging me to post on my blog, so prepare yourselves for an extravaganza of colour, light and image! Austin is known as a great place for live music, which presumably explains the psychadelic guitars left lying around the streets. Here's Graham with a couple of his dream instruments. We visited the Texas State Capitol, built on a grand scale from tons of pink granite and limestone. The state capit o l, you understand, is located in the state capit a l. Don't get confused. Americans definitely tend towards the domes-and-pillars school of architecture for their governmental buildings. I had a feeling this was true, so did a quick search for corroborating evidence and discovered this great site by a ph...