A friend of mine offered me a $40 off coupon for Hello Fresh. Because I have always been curious about these mail order cooking subscriptions, I figured now would be the time. 

There’s an app. You start by downloading that. Then you pick things like your meal preference, ours was vegetarian, of course. I was a bit bummed there was no vegan option, but 2 of the 3 meals only had feta as the dairy so that was easy to take away. You can also choose meals for 2 or 4 people. So we had 3 meals delivered to us for 2 people for the week. 

Normally, the cost for 3 meals for 2 people would be $60. That’s $10 a serving, $20 a meal. Luckily I had that handy dandy $40 off coupon. So this first week cost me $20. That’s another downer about this, is it’s pretty pricey in my personal opinion, so I had high expectations! 

You can pick your delivery date, which was nice, so mine was delivered on a Saturday. It came in a nice box insulated to hold in the cold from the ice packs it contained. The ice packs were still partly frozen when I got it, so that made me feel good knowing the packaging had done its job. There was a note on top stating my Tortellini were hiding on the bottom under an ice pack to keep them extra cold. That was helpful because I might have missed them otherwise. 

The produce looked pretty good, a bit small, but fresh. It also came with big recipe cards with instructions and a picture of what it’s supposed to look like. Each meal was in a brown bag that was labeled accordingly. There was also a bunch of other crap advertisementy things I just threw away. 

Meal time, here we go. 

First meal I prepared was the Southwestern Tortellini Salad. 

It says it takes 10 mins to prep, with a total of 30 mins to make this meal. Lies!!! All lies!!! This one took me almost an hour! I may not be a professional chef, but I’m pretty knowledgeable and quick in the kitchen so that made me pretty annoyed because I was super hungry bones! 

Maybe it was my stomach growling that was messing with my anger level, but the fact that there was no EVOO in the bag pissed me off. There’s a little packet of this and a little packet of that, you can’t put some damn Olive Oil in a little packet?! What if I didn’t have that shit?! Also, how do I cut cilantro? Do I use the stems too? Oh and the note about cutting the corn off the cob, show a picture next time! If I hadn’t done it before, I would’ve been really confused. 

Ok, so after all the confusion and time and energy, my sink and oven were full of dishes! Arg. I hate doing dishes. This better taste delicious….

Bland…. bland…. bland bland bland! You’d think with salt and peppering every step of the way and the addition of chili flakes, there’d be a little something to this dish. Nah man, too many black beans, too many dishes. 

Sad face. 

Next dish! 

Sweet Potato Sunshine Bowl, I don’t have high hopes. 

This one only took about 45 mins. Shorter than the first meal, but still longer than the 30 it states. There’s a little note in the corner I seemed to have missed about chickpeas in the oven. Those bitches pop when you roast them! Scared the living daylights out of me! 

You also needed EVOO for this recipe, but for the dressing. You cannot replace with just any ol’ oil in this recipe if you don’t have olive oil, because it’s for a dressing, not coating a pan. That was annoying to me. Also, tell someone there’s going to be a leftover half of a lemon so I don’t think I just mucked up the whole meal! 

This meal turned out much better! Way more flavor in this one and it was neat because I had never even heard of Farro before, so learning to cook with that was a great new experience. And, sooooooo many dishesssss!!! 

Last meal! 

Chickpea Powered Mediterranean Couscous

Truth be told, I did not make this dish. I was pretty annoyed and fed up with the first two that I decided I’d just separate the ingredients and use them in other dishes. The chickpeas, I turned into hummus. The zucchini became chips, the tomatoes were put in wraps, etc etc. 

As I’m sure you have gathered by this review, I am personally not a fan of Hello Fresh. If I had paid any more than $20 for those meals, I would’ve felt completely ripped off. I can use $60 to create every meal for 2 people for a week, not just 3 dinners. The portions were small, so no leftovers. The recipes themselves weren’t that great. The work and clean up was kind of dumb for the return. 

It was super easy to cancel my subscription which was awesome. 

I’m going to try Blue Apron this coming week, so fingers crossed they change my mind on the whole mail order cooking subscription because right now, you’re better off just going to a restaurant with that money and save yourself the time and clean up! 

EDIT:

Welp, I received my free Blue Apron meals. They normally cost the same as HF (Hello Fresh). I feel so ripped off that I didn’t even create a whole other blog for their review. Everything came shottily packaged. The produce wasn’t very good, it was either tiny and unrippened, as if picked too soon, or had slices in it and mold growing. Yum! 

All the food was just thrown in the box, not split up by meal like HF. That was annoying to me. Their recipe cards seemed less helpful than HF also. So, I used the food I could salvage in other meals I made throughout the week. 

Cancelling BA (Blue Apron) was a pain in the arse! Hidden somewhere in the help section is a BA email address you have to send an email to requesting cancellation. Then they email you back how to do cancel. It took awhile for them to respond to me, I had to send multiple emails before they would respond. Then, the link they send you, you have to cancel from a computer and can’t use your phone. 

Moral of the story, if you’re going to try one of the two, do Hello Fresh. However, you’d be better off going out to eat or grocery shopping for yourself!