Home Recipe Boxes

When we first had the children both my wife and I reverted to a lot of ready meals and freezer food, which very quickly became repetitive and clearly wasn’t doing us any good.
I wasn’t the best of cooks and even now I don’t really know what Im doing.
I only had a limited “Man” repertoire of Massive Steaks, Pork chops, Lamb chops, Meat, Meat and more Meat please plus a good dash of read wine from which to pick meals from.

HelloFresh

To break out of the food rut we found ourselves in Jo decided to give HelloFresh a go, they had been advertising heavily on the TV at the time and this seemed to be a solution.

The box gets delivered by a courier to your house in a thick cardboard box, this is lined with a substance called woolcool, which I later found to be most useful for making Archery Targets.

There are 4 meals in each box with everything needed to cook them except for salt, pepper and oil.

The meat was always of a very high quality and kept very cool within coolwool and the ice filled bags.
The recipe cards are very clear and easy to follow, with pictures for some of the stages to help you keep on track. They also provide the odd helpful cooking tip.

We must have had these boxes delivered nearly every week for about 2 years before we started to tire. But we now had a huge stack of recipes from which we could source the ingredients for ourselves.
What eventually stopped us were repetitions of the same meals with fewer new recipes but more so the fact that the vegetables weren’t arriving in the namesake “fresh” state. We did complain and we sort of knew why there was an issue, the cool packs were effecting them. For quite a while I kept a stock of carrots and celery to replenish the delivered but eventually we stopped.

Assessment

I would advise anyone looking for a packaged food delivery to give them a try they really did save us a lot of time when the children were younger.

You don’t have to be a proficient cook, using them expanded my knowledge of cooking and gave me a lot more confidence in the kitchen. I now have a very healthy repertoire of meals to choose from and I have HelloFresh to thank for that.

We will probably use them again in the future when a new set of recipes becomes available but probably not to the level we have in the past.

The Spicery

These boxes aren’t complete packages as HelloFresh, they are recipes packed with just the spices and herbs necessary to make the meals but none of the veg or meat.

I cannot fault the quality of the spices provided in these boxes or the quality of the packaging and instructions.
Boxed small enough to slide through the letter box so you don’t end up with a box on the doorstep after work.

Each box contains two meals however the recipes for me proved too cumbersome in two ways:-

1. They required far too many ingredients, some of which were either not readily available or you had to buy a whole jar and only use some of it, the rest going to waste.
2. The recipes required far too long to prepare and cook. They required quite some effort and while I like cooking I don’t want to be spending well over an hour in the evening dedicated to one meal.

Assessment

These recipes are for a really high quality meal and if your wanting to stretch you skills and spend more time in the creative processes these could be a perfect fit for you.
Again we may look at the odd box in the future but at the moment they are too much faff for me at the moment.

SimplyCook

These are the boxes we currently purchase, and like the Spicery boxes are just the spices or marinades for the meals with the rest being sourced by us.

Again the recipe instructions are very clear, however they have no images to follow like HelloFresh but I don’t feel this detracts from them.
Each recipe requires only a few ingredients and each being no longer than 45min to cook, most generally a lot less than that.

The recipes are varied and there app allows you to easy select which recipes you want in the box and when you want it delivered.
Again the box is small enough to fit through your letterbox and each meals ingredients come packed in a smaller box of three pots.

Assessment

The spices and sauces provided do give an extra flavour punch to a meal. The time and ingredients that would be required to achieve these flavours is the saving you”re making. The recipes allow you to explore different meals and the way the delivery’s selected allows you to select old favourites or experiment with a new one.

If you wish to try Simply Cook, click the link below you can claim your first box for free and we will get a discount.

Conclusion

All these boxes have given me more confidence in what I can do in the kitchen, we eat from scratch now the majority of the time and I make time every Saturday morning to go shopping for fresh ingredients. This has reduced our shopping bills dramatically and we get to eat far better than we have in the past.
If your stretched for time, eating rubbish or wanting to build confidence in the kitchen one of these deliveries can really help.