Partner Moaning about Hello Fresh

[SouthMumof2]

AIBU for wanting to give Hello Fresh a try?
I work full time as does partner. Have 2 kids 12 & 10. I do the school pick up and home to cook tea every night. I am so sick of cooking the same few meals on repeat. I admit I am no cook but can follow instructions. When I get home from a full on day at work I don’t have mental capacity to think what to cook. Sometimes ending up going out to eat / takeaway as want something tasty but don’t know how to create at home. I said to partner I want to try Hello fresh so all the ingredients are there with a plan to follow, will be nice to try new stuff and kids said they will try it all and help to cook. Partner so grumpy about it, saying it’s very expensive and we could just make a meal plan at start of week (we’ve been saying that for years but never do) and it’s the creative aspect of planning I struggle with. The first box is £20 for 3 meals for 4 of us. We both earn very well so money not an issue. Is it ok to give it a try or is it a waste of money and I should stick to same boring meals?

We use gousto. I dont find it fidly. Some are more than others but you can choose the ones you like. I work full time plus and my life is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better now I have gousto (and a cleaner) my ex knob of a husband would never 'let' me get one. My fiance actually suggested both so we send more time together. I love cooking, so we do four meals from gousto and I cook Fri/Sat/Sunday. Also, its only me, my fiance and my 11 year old during the week, and meals for 2 from gousto are fine. They are really big portions. On the occasions they need beefed up I through some garlic bread in or peel a few more potatoes. I would highly reomend it and actually I think it saves money as I dont get exhaisted and buy takeaways.

Definitely give it a try for a few weeks whilst it is on offer! You can then build up a collection of recipe cards, and just buy the ingridients yourself in future. It's really helpful for adding to your repertoire of meals. I often do a Hello Fresh box once or twice a year just for new recipes.

I know you can find new recipes online, but the Hello Fresh box forces you into actually trying them out and takes away some of the mental load.

We’ve done HF before.

Pros: New recipes, takes pressure out of meal planning, food is generally pretty nice, decent range that kids will enjoy.

Cons: So much packaging, we ended up wasting a meal or so a week just because life got in the way, some of the recipes create so much washing up, some of the recipes take way longer than they say to prep and can be fiddly, and the ‘very quick’ ones aren’t really worth the money IMO, quality of ingredients sometimes not the best, the nicest recipes often have an additional fee for them.

Ive found that the Simply Cook boxes are good for us as they are non-perishable so you can have a stock in cupboard.

But the best thing for me has been the Recipe Keeper app. It scans PDFs or photos or websites and extrapolates the recipe, and then it can generate meal plans based on criteria. I have a big repertoire now of slow cooker and other minimal prep meals that are in the app, then I generate the meal plan and it makes a shopping list too. It took some initial time to get recipes in there and I am continually adding new recipes as we discover them, but it’s made life a lot easier.

Slow cooker is great too, if you can get 5 mins in morning to put some stuff in and switch it on then it can free up your entire evening. The Poppy Cooks and Bored of Lunch slow cooker books have a really wide range of recipes too.

Hello Fresh is expensive, particularly after the promotions run out, and it isn’t always particularly easy to cook.

Meal planning isn’t too hard. Make a list of twenty meals you like. Pick seven each week. Add more meals to the bank as you think of them.

But that isn’t just your job and if your husband doesn’t want to demonstrate any effort then I’d make the decision that suits you.

Tell him this month he can meal plan, shop for those meals and cook them and then you can both decide next month if he’s happy to continue to do that until the end of time or if he’d like to give Hello Fresh a try.

We used to do Hello Fresh and loved it. I’m tempted to start it up again actually. You can get great intro deals so definitely worth a try and you can then decide whether it’s worth it. When our intro deal ran out we switched to Gousto and used their deals, then by the time they ran out Hello Fresh were offering us deals to go back to them so it was a long time before anyone wanted full price from us 🤣🤣 I’ve got a folder where we keep all the recipe cards and even when we’ve not been signed up to the service we still use some of the recipes and just buy the ingredients in our weekly shop.

For example, this is next week. The app generated it for me, most of them are slow cooker meals as we have a busy week next week so I told app to pull the recipes from my slow cooker and quick meals collection, when I press on the recipe it shows me the ingredients and method. I think I did pay for it but it’s been well worth it.

As others have said, Gousto is better and I have tried both. Ask around your friends as they give good discount codes so you get about 60% off your first box and then 25% off the subsequent two. The meals are really tasty and varied.

I'm siding with your husband.

Gousto isn't as convenient as it was. Each meal would have its own recipe bag which you could put straight into the fridge.
Then it changed to everything plonked into one bag and you had to sort it into recipes.

Might as well do that yourself and with your own groceries and search their recipes online.

Adding to the chorus of those saying if he doesn't cook he doesn't get a say.

I rotate Hello Fresh, Gousto and Green Chef, as they normally send discounts shortly after you cancel. I don't think it's worth paying full price, but I do appreciate not having to plan every meal, and I like only having what I need, so there's none of having to think of a meal to use up the rest of something, and then think of another one to use up ingredients left from that one, etc. etc.

I think I have codes for a free box from Hello Fresh and Green chef if anyone wants one

Bless him @SouthMumof2.

so I’m guessing he has nothing to do with the bulk of the meal planning, prepping, cooking and cleanup? But wants an opinion on it now?

how about he shows you how’s it’s done. He can be in sole charge of it throughout May. See how he gets on?

I tried hellofresh but the portion sizes are tiny. Especially when you have a growing family. Regards the meal planning...... what if you prepped a weeks worth of meals at the weekend and froze them,?? Then all that needs doing is getting the meal out the night before, whoever gets in first starts cooking. Or put it in the slow cooker all day x

Well on the basis that I don’t expect either would check with the other before spending £20/£40 in the supermarket on food, if I were you I’d just order it!

We do it very occasionally and find it worth it just to freshen up our repertoire. We have a favourite Gousto recipe that came to us in a box 10 years ago and we make it regularly (cowboy beans).

YANBU for wanting to try. However, I have tried it and I think it's harder work then me meal planning and doing my thing. The mental load to try following an unknown recipe every day is huge.

If you want convenience, get a sauce in a bag thing and buy your own meat and veg. Otherwise, write down all the receipes you can cook and then just do a meal plan like a school. Like monday is this, tuesday that, and then repeat every 2-3 weeks. (Depending on how many meals you know how to cook).

The Batch Lady has some ideas for doubling up recipes and I think her books might have some meal plans. I liked her recent series Batch from Scratch though I can’t remember what channel it was on.

Tell him meal planning sounds great and leave him to sort it all.

I was in a rut a while back and used Gousto for a while.
DH and DC got involved as liked that ingredients were just there and didn’t have to be found in cupboards, weighed, etc. It gave my DH confidence that he could cook.
We don’t use it now, but make some of the meals regularly as they were so good and easy.
Definitely worth trying it, especially with the introductory offers.

Personally, I'd recommend Gousto rather than Hellofresh, I found the former far nicer than the latter.

And yes, they are both expensive. But the weeks I don't get Gousto, it's almost guaranteed that I'll get a takeaway at some point, so it's not actually costing me anything more, and I'm getting 4 reasonably healthy meals instead of one takeaway thats definately not healthy.

I find Hello Fresh a bit too time consuming for mid week meals.

I prefer simply Cook (bought from the supermarket) because they are 4 ingredient/ 20
minute meals..

(having said that I’d insist DH did the meal planning, shopping and cooking from now on just for being a twit!)

Another person who has tried both Hello Fresh and Gusto... Gusto wins by a mile!

I agree, it's the planning aspect when you are worn out that is so exhausting. It takes time and effort, and then you have either got to go shopping for the stuff or organise the online shop. All of that costs money in terms of your time.

DS spent an utterly miserable few months selling Hello Fresh door to door, but he said the product was pretty good, and he's quite a foodie.

I second @doodleschnoodle Recipe Keeper is a brilliant app. I’ve paid for the full version and used it for years. It will generate meal plans, shopping lists, you could even print of a personal recipe book with your favourite recipes in, which I did and gave as Christmas presents one year, along with baskets of ingredients. Highly recommend it.

I found Hello Fresh and Gousto were both a huge waste of money, even with their introductory offers. The quality of the ingredients, especially the meat, was awful with both, and we found the portion sizes were tiny. I found it more time consuming to sort through all the tiny little individual packets of ingredients for each meal than to make a meal from scratch, and most of the ingredients were things that I had in my cupboard anyway. We ended up throwing at least one meal from each away without bothering to cook it as it was so disappointing.