Hello Fresh

You guys, I am SO EXCITED about a ‘new thing’ I just tried. It’s called “Hello Fresh” and it’s a meal-prep delivery service that is now serving Canada. I decided to give it a try just for fun, and my first shipment arrived today. I want to tell you about my experience!

When setting up your delivery, the first thing you do is select from either a Veggie, Pronto, or Family Plan and each comes with three meals. I opted for the Veggie plan as I want to know exactly where my protein comes from. I felt that if I wanted to add in protein after the fact, that it was an easy thing to do - and that’s exactly what I did tonight actually. (I did email them asking where they get their meat/chicken/fish from and haven't heard back yet. I'm not about to start ordering anything other than the veggie, but I wanted to make a point that consumers want to know if the protein is hormone free, free range, etc. When I hear back, I will let you know).  

Here's what's inside... 

 Tonight's Recipe

 Contents

 All sorted...Ta Da!

 My little helper - grating the ginger

 Everything chopped and ready to go

 Little chef at work

 Stir-fry!

End result, with the brown rice and my salmon

Here’s what I loved about it:

-Everyone loves getting “mail” and when the mail is a big box of food, who wouldn’t be happy about THAT?!

-It turned out to be a FANTASTIC way for my daughter and I to make a meal together. It still required a fair amount of ‘prep’ but having everything pretty much laid out and ready to go, along with a recipe for us to follow was actually quite brilliant. Cooking together is something that I wanted to start doing more of, and this was an excellent way to do it. I don't often buy eggplant, and so she learned more about a new-er-to-her food also! Bonus. 

-It provides some diversity to my regular weekly meals and it’s awesome that someone else has essentially decided what to make, found the recipe, and put together all the ingredients. One of the reasons for trying this service was simple to try new things!

-I’m an average cook at best, so having a fairly easy recipe to follow was perfect.

-The meal itself turned out to be quite delicious!

Here’s what I didn’t love:

-Seems like a fair amount of packaging waste (i.e. all the little bags, the box it was shipped in, and the ice packs that came with it). 

-Some of the ingredients were starting to look a little ‘tired’ (i.e. the chopped red onion and the ginger).

-I don’t always choose organic veg, but I quite often do, and these obviously weren’t organic…I really don't have a clue WHERE any of the foods are from actually, so for me, this is a big negative. 

The meal I chose for tonight was the Hoisin Stir-Fry. It was easy to follow and required about 15 minutes of up front prep. Since I had picked up some of my most favorite salmon from the North Sea Fish Market today, I opted to make a little soy/Asian sauce to go on top and it was a perfect complement for this meal.

It was all done in about 35-40 minutes (as it states), and while it was dairy free, it wasn’t gluten free.

Overall, this was super fun and the next two dishes for this week look good also. I purchased the box for next week as it has some really amazing looking meals too. At this point (only after making one meal…) I would recommend it to a family looking to “spice things up” in the kitchen, or a family looking for some convenience options. I'll post the other meals as I make them.