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What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Since the weather's getting summery, I've been experimenting with different kinds of milk tea (with and without boba).
The one I like the most thus far is also the easiest:
Then just blend it together, then drink with plenty of ice (and boba pearls if you like those)
About 5 months ago my sister gave me and my family 3 free meals from HelloFresh, and we have kept the subscription going since then. The meals themselves have all been great, the recipes are really well designed, and so we will probably keep it going indefinitely. My only real complaints are that the salt levels are too high for our tastes, so I typically cut them back significantly, and the slightly guilty feeling I get using the service due to all the plastic packaging. It has cut down our food waste a fair amount though, each meal is much healthier and more reasonably sized portions than what we were eating before, and we're also eating a lot less meat due to their excellent vegetarian/pescatarian options, which are all positives... so that does balance it out a bit, I guess.
Has anyone else here used HelloFresh or some other meal subscription service like it? If so, what are your thoughts on it?
I always hear an add for HelloFresh during the Off Menu Podcast but have never tried it, sounds good! Someone gave my partner and I a few of their Blue Apron meals while they were out of town and we weren't really taken with them. Glad to hear HelloFresh is much better.
I'm not sure if it counts, but we subscribe to a weekly CSA (community supported agriculture) and local fish delivery. We started during Covid and it's completely changed the way we cook. It's exciting to have weird ingredients, or maybe just unusual for me, so we can try out recipes for squid/radishes/herring/etc.
I've never tried Blue Apron, so I don't necessarily know if HelloFresh is actually "much better" than it. It could just be that my tastes are not particularly refined, and I'm not that great a cook, so HF would end up disappointing you just as much, or even more, than BA. :P
p.s. Those CSA and local fish delivery services are cool. I should see if there is something similar in my area.
cc @cfabbro
I've tried both and Hello Fresh is indeed better. They have more variety than Blue Apron. Although after over a year of exclusively using their vegetarian options it can get a little repetitive. My only complaint is it's not nearly as cheap as buying for myself because they need to rush ship boxes of fresh produce with heavy ice bags inside. And you're getting tiny bags of rice shipped once a week instead of buying 10 lbs of rice in bulk.
It would be much harder to do but I'd love to live in a world where I can get a meal kit that can depend on me enough to ship me certain ingredients in bulk.
I feel like local grocery stores could manage this with a monthly plan. Pick up your bulk items on the first week of the month and go every week for the produce. You're probably already going down there once a week anyway so no extra shipping logistics are required. Basically "give me a shopping list as a service". Then you hook that into an existing grocery pickup service and it's really very efficient for the consumer.
This is kind of what we do. We go to Costco once a month and get the bulk items (beans, rice, stock, and cheese (amazing selection and price)). Every week our produce is delivered by our CSA and we supplement it with the local farmers market if there is anything special we want. It cuts down on the amount of prepared food we get, but that tends to be a good thing.
I'm not sure if it still exists, but there was an example of a company in the book "The Lean Startup" that did just this. They would figure out what your local grocery store stocked and then get chefs to make recipes. I'll see if I can find out what it was called.
Yeah, even if they had a hybrid option where they still provide the recipes and shipped the single-use/fresh ingredients, but then provide us a list of the required staples that keep for longer (e.g. rice, cabbage, garlic, condiments, spices, etc.) so they don't need to keep shipping individual portions of those to us every week, that would be awesome.
p.s. If you want a recipe based meals + shopping list plan instead, I would recommend checking out Sorted Food's sidekick app. If/when I get tired of HelloFresh that's probably what I will likely switch to using.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve downloaded their app and it looks great.