Fresh food, three dinners’ worth, delivered to your doorstep (or office if you’d rather), organized and packed by recipe - Lemongrass Chicken, Beef Cabbage Wraps, Ratatouille With Lemon-Roasted Cod - with everything thing you need (save salt, pepper, sugar and olive oil) for a home-cooked meal for two. Sounds convenient, right? And possibly quite tasty, depending on what you like.
For people who enjoy cooking but dread grocery shopping or are reluctant to try new recipes, Hello Fresh, a recipe kit home delivery service, may be the answer.
The service recently expanded to include Arkansas in its delivery area.
For more information, visit hellofresh.com.
Each week subscribers get to choose three dishes (out of five choices) to be delivered. Each week includes a meat, chicken, fish and vegetarian option. A vegetarian-only plan is available as well.
I recently gave the service a try and was pleasantly surprised. The fresh vegetables - radishes, red and yellow bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, shallots, watercress, arugula - were picture-perfect upon arrival.
The large recipe cards with color photos and easy-to-follow instructions made preparation a breeze, and each recipe lived up to the claim of taking less than 30 minutes to prepare.
First up were the beef wraps.
The bundle had two flour tortillas, an onion, a package each of radishes and watercress, a little baggie of cashews, a packet of vinegar, a packet of mustard, four packets of barbecue sauce, a bag of shredded cabbage and carrots and 12 ounces of ground beef.
The radishes, watercress and cashews combined with the vinegar, mustard and a few glugs of my olive oil for a salad. The beef was cooked with the onion and seasoned with barbecue sauce. The instructions called for using just ¼ of the onion, but I somehow didn’t see the ¼ and used the whole thing. It was still delicious. The beef and cabbage-carrot mixture goes in the tortillas while the watercress salad rounds out the meal. It wasn’t the most filling dinner, but the combination of flavors and textures was very appealing and satisfying. For the calorie conscious, the meal logs in at less than 500 calories.
The next day we had the chicken. This recipe was a bit more complicated. It involved multiple pieces of kitchen equipment and a bit more preparation. And while the results were tasty, I had a few problems with the chicken recipe. It called for mincing lemon grass and shallots and combining them with olive oil as a marinade. Then later the marinade was served as a sauce.
First, lemongrass, no matter how fine you mince it, is too fibrous to eat. Second, unless the marinade is heated to boiling, you should never serve a marinade that came in contact with uncooked meat, fish or chicken as a sauce. And the instructions simply said to heat it. Third, I don’t consider a mixture of oil, onion and tough, fibrous grass to be a sauce.
The chicken, paired with couscous studded with black olives, sun-dried tomatoes and a handful of arugula, was still quite flavourful, even if I did serve it without the “sauce.”
Finally we had the ratatouille and cod.
This dish was the first one that I felt included an adequate serving of vegetables (red and yellow bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes), yet that could be because I didn’t have to share them with my no-tomatoes dinner companion.
PROS
Having an instant answer to the question “What’s for dinner” for three days of the week.
No last-minute stop at the grocery store during rush hour.
Tasty, portion-controlled meals.
Helps pull you out of a recipe rut by introducing new dishes to your rotation.
The recipe cards include the measurements, so you can re-create the dishes.
CONS
Cost. The service isn’t cheap. At $70 ($60 for the vegetarian option) for three meals of just two servings each, it would be more cost-effective to eat out three days a week, as restaurant portions are often larger, allowing for leftovers for other meals.
Risk of temperature fluctuations harming the food. My box was cool inside when I opened it, but far from the 40 degrees maximum at which meat, fish and poultry should be kept.
Must prepare and eat all three meals consecutively for peak freshness. The Hello Fresh website claims the ingredient will stay edible for a full week; however, in my experience fragile greens like arugula and watercress don’t keep for more than a couple of days. And fish, unless frozen, doesn’t keep for more than a day or two, tops.
Unless you keep a stash of fresh vegetables on hand (and doesn’t that defeat the purpose of delivery?) you may be stuck eating foods you don’t like or doing without.
Bottom line:
I think the service would be great for a vacation rental if you don’t want to eat out for every meal, or for anyone mobile but housebound because of surgery or illness. But as a regular, every week sort of deal it is simply too expensive.
Food, Pages 29 on 04/24/2013