On our journey to find the best meal subscription box service for two my husband and I recently discovered, Hello Fresh. Since we used an introductory offer, the first box cost us $29 and it came with 3 meals of 2 servings each. I have since cooked all of the meals sent and will review my experience with Hello Fresh, below.
Salmon Papillote with Couscous and Asparagus
From Hello Fresh's website. We didn't take the time to photograph this abomination.
This dish was terrible. Neither of us are fans of fish and since we weren't able to choose more specific dietary preferences we were sent a salmon meal. I paid for it, I wanted to eat it. It was really awful. The couscous was 50% onions by the time I was done making the dish. The asparagus was delicious but I could buy and roast my own asparagus for $1.99. You may ask, why didn't you just remove what you didn't like? Well, I am a firm believer that meals are designed to be cooked with all listed ingredients and I don't hate onions so I followed the recipe. The older I get the less likely I am to switch out ingredients I don't like because I find that well done dishes tend to have excellent flavor profiles regardless of the ingredients I may not be too fond of.
Lemony Pan Seared Chicken with Pesto Potato Salad and Peas
Photo from my kitchen table.
This dish was the best dish in the box by far. It was delicious. I'll admit it seemed to be a thrown-together assortment of food but it was very good. It was filling, yummy, low calorie, and healthy. My husband isn't a fan of peas but he still ate and enjoyed this dish. I would eat this again.
Lasagna Kale Penne Bake
This is what the dish actually looks like. Their web photo was not an accurate depiction.
This dish was okay. Of all the dishes it was the largest, quantity-wise. Holy crap this was easily 4 servings, not two! What is really a shame is that since it turned out to be about 50% kale, reheating it was not very tasty. The recipe, again, called for way too much onion but this time I removed 75% in order to give the meal hope of being tasty. It was extremely lacking on the meat (around 1/2 a pound of ground meat total), it lacked enough tomato sauce, and the kale was overwhelming. I, personally, highly prefer lacinato (dinosaur) kale to curly kale and this used a TON of curly kale. Truly, we expected it to taste terrible when we sat down, but, to our surprise it was overwhelmingly average and edible. We would never make this or eat this again. I really think, again, that these dishes seems thrown together. It's almost like Hello Fresh was trying to clear out their warehouse of a bunch of random crap. The reason for their menu items this week was 'to add green for St. Patrick's day' but it really kind of sucked.
Hello Fresh Rating:
+ Generous portions: 10/10
- Overpriced at $70 a week: 1/10
- Insane amounts of packaging: 1/10
+ Product Quality (High quality but not organic): 8/10
- Recipes overall: 3/10
Total Score (out of 50): 23/50
WOULD NOT RECOMMEND
***Here is a coupon code you can use to get your first box for $29: FNYRQ8ZH
Salmon Papillote with Couscous and Asparagus
 |
| From Hello Fresh's website. We didn't take the time to photograph this abomination. |
This dish was terrible. Neither of us are fans of fish and since we weren't able to choose more specific dietary preferences we were sent a salmon meal. I paid for it, I wanted to eat it. It was really awful. The couscous was 50% onions by the time I was done making the dish. The asparagus was delicious but I could buy and roast my own asparagus for $1.99. You may ask, why didn't you just remove what you didn't like? Well, I am a firm believer that meals are designed to be cooked with all listed ingredients and I don't hate onions so I followed the recipe. The older I get the less likely I am to switch out ingredients I don't like because I find that well done dishes tend to have excellent flavor profiles regardless of the ingredients I may not be too fond of.
Lemony Pan Seared Chicken with Pesto Potato Salad and Peas
 |
| Photo from my kitchen table. |
This dish was the best dish in the box by far. It was delicious. I'll admit it seemed to be a thrown-together assortment of food but it was very good. It was filling, yummy, low calorie, and healthy. My husband isn't a fan of peas but he still ate and enjoyed this dish. I would eat this again.
Lasagna Kale Penne Bake
 |
| This is what the dish actually looks like. Their web photo was not an accurate depiction. |
This dish was okay. Of all the dishes it was the largest, quantity-wise. Holy crap this was easily 4 servings, not two! What is really a shame is that since it turned out to be about 50% kale, reheating it was not very tasty. The recipe, again, called for way too much onion but this time I removed 75% in order to give the meal hope of being tasty. It was extremely lacking on the meat (around 1/2 a pound of ground meat total), it lacked enough tomato sauce, and the kale was overwhelming. I, personally, highly prefer lacinato (dinosaur) kale to curly kale and this used a TON of curly kale. Truly, we expected it to taste terrible when we sat down, but, to our surprise it was overwhelmingly average and edible. We would never make this or eat this again. I really think, again, that these dishes seems thrown together. It's almost like Hello Fresh was trying to clear out their warehouse of a bunch of random crap. The reason for their menu items this week was 'to add green for St. Patrick's day' but it really kind of sucked.
Hello Fresh Rating:
+ Generous portions: 10/10
- Overpriced at $70 a week: 1/10
- Insane amounts of packaging: 1/10
+ Product Quality (High quality but not organic): 8/10
- Recipes overall: 3/10
Total Score (out of 50): 23/50
WOULD NOT RECOMMEND
***Here is a coupon code you can use to get your first box for $29: FNYRQ8ZH
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