A few months ago, I lost my cooking mojo. I used to be able to create interesting and delicious meals with whatever I had on hand. I used to be inspired. And then, I wasn't. I started making the same three recipes over and over again, until I discovered I wasn't cooking at all anymore, and was existing on PopTarts and Kashi bars like I was on deployment again or something. When I realized that I couldn't - WOULDN'T - live like that, I discovered HelloFresh.
HelloFresh is a weekly box delivery service that sends you everything you need to make three fresh, healthy meals. You have the option to have a box that can feed two people, or a box that can feed four people. We subscribe to the former, and find that most of the time, we have leftovers. But I digress.
This service allows you to go online and choose three out of five meal options for the week. You can click the recipes and see what's included, so if you have allergies or food preferences, you know if it's something you can do or not (but, as all the ingredients come separately, you can omit whatever you'd like - in my case, I almost always discard the bell peppers). You can see the difficulty level. You can see their estimate of how long it will take you to make it.
When the boxes arrive, you'll get three clear bags labeled with which recipe they correspond to. These bags contain everything you'll need for that particular recipe, so you can just grab one bag and usually whichever meat goes along with it, and start cooking. No need to assemble everything from all over your kitchen. It's all there. And bonus, once you unpack your bag on your countertop to start cooking, you can use the bag as your trash bag, and clean as you go.
I've been a subscriber for about a year, and I've never once repeated a meal. Nearly every meal I've cooked or eaten from HelloFresh has been restaurant-quality. The chefs at HelloFresh create these recipes that combine flavors that would never, ever have occurred to me (last week, I cooked Bloody Mary Chicken, which included a sauce of garlic, pancetta drippings, diced onions, horseradish, white wine vinegar, olive oil, and hot sauce, and it was MAGNIFICENT).
For about $70 per week, it seems like it's way more expensive than you'd otherwise spend on groceries. Maybe that's true. But when I was buying ingredients in the grocery store, so much of it would go to waste because I couldn't think of what to make with it, I'd forget what I intended to make with it, or I just wouldn't feel like cooking anything, so I would order a pizza. Inevitably I wasted so much money one way or another. Now, we spend $280 a month on HelloFresh, and maybe $50 or so at the grocery store on fresh fruit and any snacks we don't get in our Amazon subscription (another post on that, later). Nothing goes to waste. And husband goes to work with a meal that makes his co-workers envious every single time.
This week, we ate chipotle-rubbed chicken salad with avocado, black beans, and pico de gallo; seared serrano steak with jalapeno rice and matchstick mango salsa; and southern cornbread pie with collard greens and minced pork. All made from scratch, with fresh ingredients, and all were amazing.
Next week, we are having Peruvian ceviche shrimp tacos, watermelon and farro salad, and what they call "Juicy Lucy" burgers, which will be served on a sesame brioche bun. I. Cannot. Wait.
If you aren't home during the day and are sketched out by the idea of raw shrimp being left out on your porch all day in the June heat, have no fear. The boxes are a styrofoam box inside a corrugated box, with several ice packs inside surrounding your ingredients.
HelloFresh, being the amazing company that they are, offer new customers one free week to see what all the fuss is about. Their customer service is outstanding as well; when contacted to let them know one box was missing a bottle of vinegar, they apologized profusely before going above and beyond to make it right with me (not going into details of how they made it right, because they're a great company and I don't want people getting ideas on how to scam them!).
So, if you're intrigued, check out HelloFresh and get your cooking mojo back, too.
-Ang
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