Transforming family meals with HelloFresh recipe boxes

Last Wednesday Daddy T received an email from me at work at 5.30pm. It was a picture of my dinner plate and the subject line was ‘Feeling proud’.

After eating pizza or burger at 10pm at night two nights in a row, I had finally managed to dive into the HelloFresh recipe box we had received to review.

The ingredients had been staring at me from the fridge a couple of days, but I hadn’t had any time to cook at a normal time because of the challenge of looking after a one-year-old and cooking simultaneously.

When a work call was cancelled last minute one day, however, I decided to make the most of the childcare I’d organised and spend the time on cooking a proper meal instead. It was a real sense of achievement and in less than an hour I had glazed pork and cous cous on the table.

It turned out both children loved cous cous–something we had then never had at home before–and I felt annoyed with myself for not having realised how incredibly easy it was to make cous cous.

The next days and week after I continued to cook everything from pancetta gnocchi to chorizo-crusted tilapia, and Daddy T and I couldn’t believe how varied our evening meals had suddenly become.

The challenge has been to keep 15-month-old Baby Boy entertained for the at least half an hour we’ve spent on cooking, but if he had been a little bit older this wouldn’t have been an issue.

And I still like it so much that I want to make this work.

I love that the children are eating more varied, healthy homemade meals, and I love that there’s less waste and that the boxes include surprisingly good quality products, including brands I recognise from shops like Bayley & Sage. Food shopping is also easy and we’re using spices we didn’t even know existed.

There are still several days during the week where I can’t fit in making a HelloFresh meal and I have to revert to very basic cooking, but since there are four meals in each box we don’t have to do it every day and the portions in the family box are also big for our two young kids, so they’ve had leftovers to eat as well.

It’s also been useful that the two boxes we’ve received included some meals with ingredients where the expiration dates meant we could save them for the weekend when we had more time.

Next on my list to do now is ordering a HelloFresh family box for next week!

A HelloFresh family box with two meals is £39 and a box with four meals is £64. There is no extra delivery charge

Tags: Dinner, Family meals, Food, Food shopping, Hello Fresh, Nutrition, Recipe box