Hello, Fresh! Goodbye, Stale?
Our Household Cuisine Needed Some Variety
Since I retired three years ago, I have become the chief cook and bottle washer in our house. Lo and alas, I always seem to cook/prepare the same things, namely:
Pizza — frozen, but value-added: I pile on onions, garlic, more cheese (cheddar and pepper jack); and after baking, we sprinkle on red pepper flakes and plop some pineapple tidbits on top, too.
Chili Beans (with grated cheddar cheese, sour cream, onions, Spanish peanuts, and either corn tortillas or corn bread)
Tuna Sandwiches (with sliced dill-, sweet-, and bread-and-butter pickles, onion, celery, lettuce, lemon juice, a slice of cheddar cheese, &c)
Tacos (with grated cheddar cheese, sour cream, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, sometimes cilantro, sometimes guacamole, sometimes refried beans and/or Spanish rice on the side)
Macaroni Salad — with celery, red onion, dijon mustard, mayonnaise, all types of pickles, bell pepper, black pepper, shredded carrots, and tons of olives (with a few Ditalini macaronis for good measure [I like a little macaroni noodles with my olives]). I make the best my favorite macaroni salad, if I do brag so myself.
Enchiladas (with ground beef and tons of cheddar and pepper jack cheese, et al)
“Breakfast” (French toast, fried spuds and onions, crispy bacon)
BLTs (crispy bacon on Ciabatta bread with lettuce and tomato)
Cottage Pie (like Shepherd’s Pie, but with ground beef instead of lamb)
Cheeseburgers (on ciabatta bread, with all the “fixin’s”)
Grilled Cheese sandwiches
Garlic bread with Romaine salad and dry red wine (with “wall-to-wall” freshly sliced garlic, not garlic powder, and not with just a few microscopic pieces of garlic). I like a little bread with my garlic, not vice versa. And plenty of butter, of course.
…and a few other side dishes, such as baked spuds, mashed spuds, Maple glazed carrots, and so on.
I also make cookies from time to time (molasses or oatmeal triple chip, with chocolate, butterscotch, and either caramel or toffee bits).
So, I (and my wife) was/were getting bored of eating the same old things all the time ad infinitum ad nauseam, so I joined Hello, Fresh! to try some dishes I never make. Here’s my experience with that:
The box arrived on Monday with the meals for the week (3 meals for two people). The first recipe I will make is the Banh Mi-Style Meatballs. Here’s the placemat-sized instructions that come with that dish:
This is how it went for me, someone who has only been cooking for a couple of years and mostly making, as delineated above, relatively “easy” stuff (nuthin’ too fancy or involved, to be sure) :
Following the instructions was easy, and the end result, while not nearly as “purdy” as what they show in their photo, tasted great. Although I will say that I make a pretty “mean” Cottage Pie (and the best macaroni salad), the Banh Mi-Style dish was superb — it was at least as good as anything else I’ve ever made.
As I said, mine didn’t look as appetizing as theirs (as you can see below), but it tasted both salubrious and wirklich ganz schmackhaft (Hello Fresh is a German company), or should I say “ngon,” as Banh Mi is a Vietnamese dish. I’ll give it four out of five stars, which matches my Cottage Pie and Macaroni salad.
UPDATE 10/18/2023
Today was the Onion Crunch Chicken. I’m not normally much of a hand at eating chicken (once I learned that you are what you eat, I’ve pretty much avoided chicken, turkey, and rump roast), but we tried it tonight as the second night of Hello Fresh entrees:
Chicken Cutlets, Green Beans, and Smashed Sweet Spuds (shut my mouth!)
It was good — salubrious and savory!
UPDATED 10/31/2023
Tonight’s meal was the second best so far — again it was meatballs, but not quite as good as the Bahn Mi-Style (Vietnamese, I think) meatball recipe. Almost, though. Probably the biggest influence Hello Fresh has had on me is opening my eyes (or nose, actually) to just how good fresh thyme is. I’m really into the aroma of spices, and fresh thyme is the king of the savory aromas. I even learned through trial and error how to strip the “leaves” from the “branches” (by sliding down with thumb and forefinger from the top). These were probably the best two meals I’ve ever made.
That having been said, we are going to try Home Chef for three weeks starting next week; I’ll create a new post about that when the time comes, reviewing Home Chef and comparing it with Hello Fresh. I was actually considering giving Hello Fresh another week before switching, but could not find the Bahn Mi-Style meatballs that I was craving, so … the first Home Chef box will arrive November 7th (one week from today).
By the way, when my wife saw last night's dinner almost complete, she exclaimed, "Look at you, making a Roo!" I had no idea what she was talking about, as Roo to me is Kanga's daughter in Winnie the Pooh mythology. So I eventually found out that Roo, in this context, is actually Roux. It reminds me of a joke a co-worker used to tell: “Yesterday I didn't know how to spell Laboratory Technician, and today I is one!”
