I tried hello fresh. Unpacking a meal to find a fast food-sized mayonnaise packet as ingredient made me feel deeply sad
Most of the meals came with poor quality produce (e.g. tiny unripe avocado — something I never would have grabbed at the grocer) and a silly amount of waste for items I had already.
My least favourite part was the recipes. I’m not sure if it was just the small selection of recipes we got, but it seemed like each one was designed around a template with six photos. As if they had a spreadsheet of all their recipes and required each one to fill six columns so they could just print it out in a predictable way. This meant that if you followed the recipe you would wind up doing several redundant tasks and creating unnecessary dishes. It drove me wild. By the last meal I just read the recipe, looked at the ingredients, and improvised.
A high quality recipe should not only result in a delicious meal but also be efficient and thoughtful about order of operations and clean-up. Having full control over ingredients, HF has no excuse providing low quality recipes, never mind the ingredients.
I would recommend a NYT Cooking subscription and using a grocery delivery app instead.
But overall I really like it. I actually learned a lot about cooking. The meals aren't complicated, and they follow similar patterns, so you start picking up on things. Like seasoning in layers (they tell you to salt & pepper at multiple steps), how to improve flavors with stock, spices, how to make presentation nice. And they're all pretty quick. After a while I have a nice library of recipe cards, and now I just pick a few of them when I go to the grocery store and get the ingredients myself. And even though sometimes it doesn't feel like enough food, it almost always comes out perfect. Sometimes I'll augment the amount of rice or something like that.
So I like HelloFresh, and maybe eventually I'll graduate to more interesting meals like NYT Cooking. But HelloFresh is quick, easy, and usually good.
What do you mean about "creating unnecessary dishes"?
Instead I soaked one ingredient, while sautéing the other ingredient. When I drained the first ingredient, I just added the sautéd stuff to that bowl, saving one bowl from washing.
Another thing is the order you cut stuff. If you cut your produce first and then meat you can use the same cutting board. But if you cut meat before veggies (that will stay fresh) then you need a new board, or at least a flip.
* Using much more citrus, juice & zest * Chickpeas + spice mix + touch of liquid in a pan is an easy go-to (we're veggie) * Broth / onions in rice. * Template of flatbread + stuff on top, which they had 3 or 4 in their rotation. Easy to riff on w/ whatever you have in the fridge.
None of these are earth-shattering revelations, but the repeated practice has ingrained some of these much more, and got me cooking a little differently.
We do this every few years, it seems worth it for a while, but I can't stick with it because I hate the waste, and the recipes get pretty repetitive after a bit, doubly so w/ vegetarian meals which have fewer options.
- This company and its supply chain went to the trouble of packaging a single serving of mayonnaise for me to personally discard as my token contribution to waste. Sure, an extra mayo packet won't make a difference, but simply not caring feels bad, you know?
- I have a jar of mayo in the fridge. I didn't even need this.
- Come to think of it, everything in this meal kit is wrapped in packaging that may well outlive me, depending on where it ends up. All for one meal's worth of food that I could have obtained more cheaply, less wastefully, and with more control over customization had I mustered the effort to plan ahead.