Racheerachh Reviews: HelloFresh

A friend sent me a free box of HelloFresh so I decided to try it out. I ended up getting two free boxes thanks to a mix up on their end, which was kind of nice, but also a bit annoying because spoiler: I'm not really a fan.

I didn't care for any of the recipes we were sent so I ended up repurposing the ingredients to make other dishes.

My main gripe with these delivery meal kits is the amount of waste when it comes to the packaging. There's a humongous box, there's a cool pack (which is reusable, but I'm assuming most people just throw this away), there's insulating material, there are the little containers that hold the ingredients and then the box that holds the little containers and packages of ingredients, and honestly, it's too much. I'm trying so hard to live a greener life and this is a step in the wrong direction.

To be honest, the ingredients themselves were meh. The chicken was fine, but looked like scrap pieces that weren't pretty enough to be sold in a normal super market because they were pretty misshapen.

I made salads with the chicken breasts, but I hated it. Breast has zero flavor so I could barely force myself to eat it.

I did make a fried rice pretty true to the recipe, but tweaked it by adding in all of the ingredients at once instead of dirtying up multiple pans like they wanted me to.

This dish was meant to be enjoyed with shrimp so I made coconut shrimp. Honestly, if it weren't for the breading, we wouldn't have touched this shrimp. It was really poor quality and it tasted kind of dirty; it's difficult to explain but it tasted like the shrimp were harvested from garbage infested water.

The final meal I made was a beef bowl that was supposedly Szechuan inspired but also had cumin seed, which was supposed to be unique. I personally did not enjoy the combination of cumin seed with the flavor of soy sauce.

And I didn't even follow the recipe correctly. I made a bunch of noodles because I thought the amount of rice that was provided was barely enough for one human, and added a fried egg and cilantro on top.

I think the only benefit to these meal boxes is to help beginner cooks learn to navigate the kitchen. But I think once you gain some basic skills and learn what flavors you like, going grocery shopping on your own is more economical, practical, you'll get better quality ingredients, and there's so much less waste.

But hey, you do you.

xoxo.