Three Days with Hello Fresh

Ever come home from work and look around the kitchen feeling uninspired to cook anything more ambitious than a Waitrose meal ready to pop in the oven? That’s pretty much every night for me. So I am fully on board with the concept of Hello Fresh, especially for their encouragement of incorporating a bit of creativity with weeknight meals.

At the beginning of 2012 when the company first launched in London, I had the pleasure of reviewing Hello Fresh. They were fabulous then and even more fabulous now. And I’m not just saying that because they gave me three nights of free food!

What’s it all about? You choose a number of days and how many people you want to feed. Hello Fresh then puts together a box of fresh ingredients for you along with a few recipes they select. The quantity of the ingredients matches pretty much exactly to the recipes included. Each night, you cook something new!

The recipes come on sleek black colorful cards with pictures of the ingredients on the front along with all of health information (ie – Kcal, fat, carbs, protein) and on the back an easy list of instructions that are also illustrated. It’s affordable too as well with 3 meals for 2 people costing £39 (or £36 for a vegetarian box) and free delivery in mainland UK.

My three recipes this time were:

• Chicken Paillard with Crushed Rosemary Potatoes, Rocket and Gremolata
• Roasted Coconut Cod with Shiitake Mushrooms, Mange Tout and Egg Noodles
• Roasted Chicken with Chorizo, Pearl Barley and Cous Cous Jumble

Here’s a better look at the recipe cards and my finished masterpieces:

Chicken Paillard with Crushed Rosemary Potatoes, Rocket and Gremolata

Roasted Coconut Cod with Shiitake Mushrooms, Mange Tout and Egg Noodles

Roasted Chicken with Chorizo, Pearl Barley and Cous Cous Jumble

How did I do? Our favourite was the coconut cod. Such a mix of flavours! But they were all delicious!

A LITTLE LONDON OBSERVATIONIST DISCOUNT

Hello Fresh have offered us a special LLO reader discount. So if you’re keen to give it a try, visit the Hello Fresh website, choose your meal plan and enter the code LITTLELONDON at checkout for £15 off your first order. Let me know if you go for it and what you think. Enjoy!

Hello Fresh

It’s 10pm and I’ve just gotten home from working overtime. The doorbell rings. It’s a man standing there with a smile and two paper bags full of food for me from Hello Fresh. They’d been kind enough to arrange a late delivery.

The bags contain food for the next five days as well as five recipes for which the exact ingredients have been included. If I need 2 carrots, that’s what I’ll find in the bag. One clove of garlic? I find one clove of garlic. You get the picture. I unpack.

I find a personalised note inside and a little bag of chocolates.

The recipes come on sleek black cards with plenty of photos and step by step instructions that are super easy to follow on the back.

(Recipe card for My Thai Green Curry with Chicken Sweet Potato and Basmati Rice, courtesy of Hello Fresh)

Here’s mine:

Recipes for the week are chosen by chefs and nutritionists. You choose the size of your bags and meals. The recipes come to you as a surprise. My recipes were:

1.) More-ish Mozzarella Chicken with Rustic Tomato Sauce and Penne

2.) Tangy Toasted Thai Rice with Fresh Prawns and Cucumber Salad (<– favourite!)

3.) My Thai Green Curry with Chicken, Sweet Potato & Basmati Rice (<– least favourite – too spicy for me!)
Oops – Forgot to take a photo of the final meal for this one. It was a tiring week…that’s my only excuse!

4.) Mamma’s Secret Beef Bolognese with Spaghetti

5.) Millionaire’s Shepherd’s Pie

As a side note: I had a happy flatmate this week because I made him help me eat everything!

Hello Fresh Positives: Surprise recipes are great because you end up cooking new food you may not have thought to otherwise; you keep the recipe cards so you can use them over again if you like them; recipe cards super easy to follow; time saver; orders are well organised; healthy food choices approved by nutritionists; forces you to cook when you otherwise would have tossed something in the microwave which is a good thing for me; can choose size of order; free delivery; food is brilliantly fresh; everything is given in portions so there is less waste; people who work at Hello Fresh are lovely and accommodating.

Hello Fresh Negatives: Surprise recipes can also be negative  because you may end up with something you don’t like; they don’t currently cater to vegetarians or special diets at the moment; no minimum sign up period – 6 days notice to cancel an ongoing weekly order; if there’s leftovers, you have to eat it for lunch the next day rather than dinner because having the fresh food in the house means you have to cook every night.

Would I sign up? Yes, but not every week or I would choose the smaller plan so there’s not so much pressure to cook proper recipes every night, however delicious they may be!

Also, just for fun and games, I’ve decided to pick the brains of Caitlin Arnold from Hello Fresh for you in a mini London-y Q&A:

LLO: As food is important to you, can you recommend a favourite restaurant choice with some fresh and healthy options for those lazy days you don’t feel like cooking?
CA: I love Cah Chi – delicious Korean food. My favourite thing is the dak bulgogi with a side of sigumchi namul – barbeque chicken with a side of steamed spinach. So good.

LLO: What’s your favourite London discovery and why?
CA: I saw the musical Wicked in London in 2007 and it changed my life. I have seen it four times since then.

LLO: Share one memory or moment that could only have happened in London.
CA:  I went to Ministry of Sound to see Sander Van Doorn in 2007 and it blew my mind.

____________

Full disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. I was given a week’s worth of free groceries from the company Hello Fresh with a promise to review their services for you. 

Cat and Coffee at Scootercaffe

This one is thanks to trailerfullofpix, the newest member of the Little London Observationist Flickr pool.

The caption reads:
“Scootercaffe, formerly a scooter shop (Scooterworks, which relocated in Bermondsey) and coffee bar with a resident cat. Now it’s just a caff with a cat. Lower Marsh Street.”

Anyone ever been here? Worth a trip? People on Qype think so. It got all 4 or 5 star reviews from everyone! Live music mid-week on Tuesday and Wesnesday and you can have a conversation over cocktails in a candlelit basement. There are, apparently, about 4 cats and tip money goes to their food fund (not that they probably don’t get enough of that from roaming around the place all day…) Qype reviews also tell me they have free films there on Monday nights.

Think I’m going to have to go down and scope it out!