To ask if anyone here does ‘Hello Fresh’

[Vikinglightning]

And if so, is it worth the money?

Seriously thinking about starting it as I’m just so fed up of trawling round the supermarkets bored, trying to think of what to eat for dinner all week. Tired of never getting the portion sizes just right (there’s only 2 of us) and either having loads left over or still feeling a bit hungry. Tired of not knowing what to cook and worrying our diets aren’t great blah, blah.

Also, I’m just so short on time at the moment so would love for dinner time to be a bit quicker and easier!

We do it for some of the week and love it. It’s convenient and fun and there’s no waste food. I’ve learnt so many little tips and tricks which I use in cooking at other times. And I love exploring different food styles.

I buy 3 meals a week. I live alone so this lasts me 2 nights each. I enjoy the meals and there’s loads of variety and choice. Definitely made me more adventurous!

I get one every few months. The food is great - fresh and healthy, but it gets a bit faffy to cook it every night when sometimes you’d love beans on toast. Be careful about cancelling or you’ll end up with a box of meals you might not like. You can usually find a code for a discounted first box and for what you get they’re good value.

I get Gousto and really enjoy it. 2 portion box for just me so I freeze some of the meals and then skip a week and use stuff up

I have done it a few times and found the meals very enjoyable. However depending on what you pick, I would not say it is necessarily quick and easy, some of the meals take quite a while to prepare and require a lot of pots and pans. I haven’t looked for a while but I think you might be able to filter on the quicker recipes.

We are also just 2 and I think it is pretty expensive for what it is, roughly £5 each per portion, I wouldn’t typically spend £10 on a midweek dinner, certainly not multiple times a week anyway.

Yes we get one now and then as others have said. You get some different ideas and always lovely recipes. Make sure you don't let it automatically order or you might get something you don't like. It's easy to stop or change setting - mines just once a month now

DB and SIL use it about 3 times a week, and love it. We tried it out, and it was very good, but DH prefers us to cook ourselves!

I gave it a try for a week and wasn't that bothered to be honest. I didn't feel like it saved me much time. I still had to cook! It annoyed me that there was so much packaging. It seemed bonkers to have a tiny sachet of stock powder and a plastic thimble of paprika or whatever. I definitely didn't feel it was worth the extra money.

I heard a very good discount code on David Tennant’s podcast. Worth trying with a good discount but not full price.

I am a person that cooked a 'proper' dinner every night. I don't know why, it's a habit.

I get it every now and then when I literally cannot be bothered to think of ideas. It mixes things up and gets me out of a rut for 3 or 4 nights.

If I could afford it more I would but I'm to stingey

Surely batch cooking would sort your problem out? Why is having too much food a problem? Stick it in the fridge and eat it tomorrow or freeze it

There’s only 2 of us - but when I cook I do enough for a big family - then we have heaps of meals in the freezer and then have loads of days when we don’t have to cook.

not those delivered boxes, but our local supermarket does similar boxes (with a lot less packaging!) which we sometimes get to try out something new, like 'exotic' to us dishes we want to try without having to buy spices or other ingredients in quantities that we might not use ever again.

I did just cook for ages. You waste a lot of plastic on little pots of artificial tasting spices so you can have three oddly flavoured things on your plate. American. They eat weird food in America.

Unfortunately the 'adding value' part means making normal food taste different. But I have a few go to recipes and I think if you do yourself up a few tins (not see through jars) if spice mixes you can have easy food that tastes nice.

For example Moroccan spices. Add to chicken. Cook chicken and veges. Stick couscous with raisins poss nuts and maybe some other spices in a bowl cover with water. 2 minutes later fluff couscous stick chicken on top and et voila.!

Just cook did a Chilean chicken that was lovely. Must be easy to find the spice mixes you need to make. Szechuan spices have a ton of flavour. Jerk chicken with beans/rice. Mexican spices for fajitas. Make up a few little cottage pies for the freezer.

I usually just end up buying something mind you but since I'm replacing my boiler Thursday that has to stop.

It’s quite good for different recipes, but most of those are available on their website so you could just use it for inspiration then buy your own ingredients

I found it really wasteful to have so many tiny pots of things and although the recipes are nice, they are quite faffy and I can’t always be bothered to salt aubergines / press tofu / bash a pomegranate etc

I was thinking about doing it because I just need a bit of space from food planning.

I couldn’t decide how many portions to order. I have DH who would probably eat a double portion and a fussy DD who probably won’t like it! Maybe getting 3 would balance it out.

I gave it a go for a few weeks but have given up.

Recipes are a mixed bag - some delicious, some gross. Some recipes were a reasonable 20/30 minutes - however many were around 1 hour.

One box arrived with creme fresh exploded all over it. Another arrived minus noodles (which were supposed to be included) causing us to have to dash out last minute and get some.

Overall I'd say it was convenient (IF they pack all the ingredients correctly) but overpriced. I find batch cooking much easier.

Yes we started getting it at the beginning of lockdown. I have to say I have been impressed with the variety with only the odd dud meal. It is also very useful because teenagers plus husband can also be left to cook a meal - everything is packed for each meal so there is no hunting through the cupboards and also there are no jars half full and unused because you only needed a teaspoon of something. It could be seen as a bit pricey but even if I popped to the shops to pick up something I would end up spending more ! No doubt lots of halo polishers will tell you its pricey and wasteful and why don't you grow your own , batch cook, etc but actually if you think about the fact you don't have to pop to the shops, or have the mental load of thinking what to cook everyday, plus also the potential benefit of getting someone else to follow the recipe cards then the benefits are broad. My teenagers now cook it for me too. that is the most miraculous thing ..
So I started out as a sceptic but ended up a convert with a few minor niggles.

I got Gousto for a few months, it was really great and super easy but then they realised it actually wasn’t as nice as I can cook myself and the ingredients didn’t seem great quality I was purely getting it for ease. The satay sauce was grainy and the veg a bit brown...

Annoyingly when you try to sign up you have to choose which plan without seeing what the menus are. I don’t know whether to choose meat and veg, or family. I want to see what the plans are.

Is there much difference between the two? Can you swop if you want to?

We get simply cook - it's a fair bit cheaper (think it's £8 for 4 recipes) but you just get the recipe cards and the herbs/ spices pots. You buy your own fresh ingredients. There's never anything particularly random or exotic you need to buy, usually just 4 or 5 ingredients, and they're all pretty much under 30 mins total cooking time. There are loads of recipes to pick from or they'll send you a random selection. You aren't limited to using the stuff within a short time frame either

Yeah, we do it, 4 meals a week for 4 of us.

I loathe meal planning more than any other household task so it works well for us. It's one of those problems that I'm happy to chuck a bit of money at to solve. We don't waste food anymore either.

@Mycatismadeofstringcheese

Annoyingly when you try to sign up you have to choose which plan without seeing what the menus are. I don’t know whether to choose meat and veg, or family. I want to see what the plans are.

Is there much difference between the two? Can you swop if you want to?

We just get the family one. I'm not sure there's a lot of difference tbh, and you get a pretty wide choice within that 'framework' each week anyway. Obviously if we were veggies we'd go for that but otherwise I'm not sure it matters too much.

I tried it but it didn't work for me as sometimes I didn't feel like any of the meals but you obviously have to use them by a certain date.
Simply cook works much better for me. I do change the recipes slightly to use what I have instead of buying specific ingredients. For example, last night I made the Cuban Mojo pasta. I used frozen sliced beans instead of broccoli, plus added chicken and extra pasta so that it made more meals.

The Balinese curry is amazing if you do decide to give Simply Cook a try

We do Mindful Chef, it's fab. Healthy, fresh and has good social principles.

We did it for a while (just the 2 of us) and it was ok. There's always offer codes floating around on the internet so make sure you get a discount, it's very expensive at full price (and not worth it, imho).

We stopped because there weren't always enough meals that we wanted to try from that week's offerings or they were all ones we'd had before. They're often a bit of a faff to cook with lots of stuff going on at the same time and loads of washing up. We had the 'rapid' meals and they weren't quick! Some recipes are also very calorific with all that full fat creme fraiche which we didn't realise until afterwards.

Having said that, we've kept lots of recipe cards from the ones we did like and still make them occasionally. All the recipes are on their website too if you just want a bit of inspiration.