Chanda ranga: Ready To Cook Meals Delivered

Wednesday 8 August 2012

Ready To Cook Meals Delivered

A few weeks ago the founders of got in touch asking if Kavey Eats would like to review a free shipment of one of their recipe and food bags.
Aiming at an audience of "busy food-lovers" they claim to "take care of your meal planning and even do the shopping for you", allowing you to "discover amazing food and provide a healthy diet to the people you love most". Their team "consists of culinary experts, top chefs, dieticians and nutritionists" who create and test their recipes, which "are delicious and easy to prepare within 30 minutes". Each meal should contain "around seven ingredients apart from basic things like salt" and recipes include dishes such as "chicken tikka masala, goulash, Mexican tacos, grilled fish with vegetables, chicken and mushroom pasta, quiche, Indian curry, and grilled chicken with grilled vegetables".

Our HelloFresh bag arrived one Monday evening in January, at around 8 pm. Currently, only Monday evening deliveries are available. Unless you eat later than we do, you won't be able to plan on using one of the meals that night, as the delivery slot can't be more specific than sometime between 5 and 9 pm.
All the ingredients were in a single large bag. On examining the contents, we immediately noticed that the chicken – the main ingredient for one of the three meals – was missing. An email the next morning resulted in delivery the following night.
We separated fridge and non-fridge items and commented that it would have been handy had the ingredients already been separated for us, both by storage medium and by recipe.
The three recipes we were sent in our bag were Mamma's Secret Beef Bolognese with Spaghetti, My Thai Green Curry with Chicken, Sweet Potato and Basmati Rice and Millionaire's Shepherd's Pie.
We were a bit surprised that two out of three were mince based, but they were all things we already cook and eat, so not a big issue.
All three recipes were designed to make servings for two people.
The recipes were provided on individual cards, A5 on a black background. One one side is a photo of the finished dish, photos of the ingredients and an ingredients list. On the other side are step by step instructions with accompanying photographs.