Taste Test: Hello Fresh

There seem to be box subscriptions for everything these days!

We're big fans of Stitch Fix, a clothing subscription where they send you 5 pieces of clothing as often as you would like (weekly, monthly, quarterly) based on a very detailed style quiz you take. You simply send back what you don't like and keep the rest.

Allyson got Stephen a sock subscription for Christmas and he's loving getting new socks in the mail each month.

She also got us a subscription to Date Box, which is a box that comes each month with a really fun and unique date idea, all supplies included! Blog post on this coming soon!

With the sock subscription, an advertisement came for Hello Fresh, a box subscription of fresh food full of specific ingredients for their recipes.

The ad had a $40 off coupon. I was sure if they were offering $40 off the first box, the price must be ridiculous! However, I decided to check it out.

For a box with 3 meals for 2 people, the price was regularly around $60. With $40 off, I decided we could try three new recipes for $20.

The way it works is you select your recipes. They have 6 different recipes to choose from each week (if you decided to receive a box weekly). I selected the week that had 3 meals that seemed like we would eat them and were the easiest to prepare. These are meals that we wouldn't normally venture to make, but when all of the ingredients are delivered to your door with step by step instructions, you run out of excuses!

In the box that is delivered to your door, are individual boxes for each meal along with a recipe book. They put the meat all together packaged in these industrial size ice packs.

We tried Rapid Maple Balsamic Chicken, Hearty Steak and Potatoes, and Braised Chicken Thighs.

Hearty Steak and Potatoes

We started with the steak and potatoes meal because who doesn't like steak and potatoes?! The directions were very easy to follow. They even told you what order to cook everything in so that it all finished at the same time. It also called for cooked cabbage, but we left that out.

This meal was REALLY good! So good, it will probably become part of our normal meal rotation. I already have plans to make the potatoes again this weekend.

I learned Rosemary is hard to chop. I wasn't actually ever successful with chopping it, I just put it in as full leaves. It worked fine.

It called for a chopped onion and I didn't realize when I was chopping it, it was for the cabbage, which I had already decided not to cook. So I baked it with the potatoes and it added really good flavor.

Yummy!!

Rapid Maple Balsamic Chicken

The next night we tried the Maple Balsamic Chicken. This had really good flavor as well. It came with a sweet potato and brocolli. We love brocolli, but had never roasted it. It was good, but I wasn't so sure how I felt about crunchy brocolli by the end of the meal. The only part that got crunchy was the part that had the olive directly on it so overall I really enjoyed it. The sweet potato wasn't bad tasting, but I think they have a weird texture so I didn't eat all of mine. It came with a smoky spice blend to put on the potato, which Stephen used and liked. I pulled out the cinnamon sugar. :)

The chicken had a really good flavor. My only complaint was the smoke from cooking it set our fire alarms off for like 20 minutes. We had all of the doors and windows open and all of the fans going. I'm not sure what I did wrong there, but it was really obnoxious!

Braised Chicken Thighs

The more I looked at the last meal, the more hesitant I got about it and was pretty sure we weren't going to be fans. So we ended up not making this recipe with these ingredients.

I've linked each picture with the recipe. Hopefully you can access it if you're interested. You might have to create a Hello Fresh account, but you can do that without actually subscribing if you're interested.

This was fun for us and we enjoyed the meals! It was nice for me having all of the ingredients right there in a box ready to go. I don't know that we'll do it again unless they start to offer a wider range of recipes. Looking at the options each week, I haven't seen a week with 3 recipes that I'm 100% confident we'd enjoy. $60 isn't worth that for me. These were good, but I didn't pay full price. 

The other problem for me is they do a great job sending portions exactly the size for the number of people you order for. I depend on the meals we cook at night to also provide me with lunch the next day and these didn't. I stretched the steak and potatoes to make 2 meals, but there was no stretching the chicken breast and brocolli. 

If you've got some room in your grocery budget,

You don't have the taste buds of a 5 year old like us,

You don't need leftovers for lunch the next day,

You like cooking with fresh ingredients, and 

You're looking for a way to spruce up your meal planning,

I would highly recommend Hello Fresh.

Even if you're not interested in ordering from them, I think you can access their recipes for free. So it might be a fun place to check out new recipe ideas!

There are tons of coupon codes floating around for them right now. We'll be getting another $40 off code next month with Stephen's socks. Let me know if you want it!