February 2016 Hello Fresh Vegetarian Box Review + Coupon

Hello Fresh is a meal kit subscription box with complete recipes and ingredients to make 3 meals every week, with each meal feeding either two or four people, depending on the plan you choose.  Though it is a subscription, you can pause your deliveries when needed — whether you are out of town, have other dinner plans, or just aren’t in love with that week’s selections.  The standard subscription provides high-quality meats (free-range chicken, anti-biotic meats, etc.) to use in the recipes.  Though we do eat meat, we cook vegetarian three times a week.  Thankfully, Hello Fresh has a vegetarian subscription option to satisfy both casual and dedicated vegetarians.  This review covers the vegetarian box, which featured a recipe by Jamie Oliver! 

I love that they put the nutritional information on the outside of the box!

Hello Fresh has great instructions, and they are easy to follow even if you are an inexperienced cook.  Each recipe includes several pictures so you maintain a sense of how the dish should look as you go along.  There is also information provided on everything you need to know about the dish — nutrition info, prep time, and even which recipes are best to make first.  The above photo shows the instructions for the recipe created for Hello Fresh by Jaime Oliver, an English celebrity chef and healthier food advocate — it’s written slightly differently (read my notes below on this!).

The boxes used by Hello Fresh keep all the ingredients for the recipes in order, and they stack nicely in the fridge.   Within each box, everything but the largest vegetables is separately packaged.  Condiments and canned goods are provided in high-end, commercial packaging.  Hello Fresh usually provides spices in their own, pre-measured branded packaging.

Wild Mushroom & Thyme Risotto with Sweet Peas and Parmesan. 45 mins, level 3, 516 cal. 

The woodsy flavors of thyme and mushrooms taste even more delicious during these chilly winter months.  That’s from the recipe card and I have to laugh, it was a “chilly” 70 here in northwest Florida today!  Enough about the weather because “weather” or not it was chilly  in your area this is one delicious recipe.

The Arborio Rice makes a nice creamy sauce which compliments the crunch of the celery, onion and peas.  The textures are very pleasing.  And the taste?  Delicious. My husband is loving the wild mushrooms.  We didn’t eat them before we started receiving Hello Fresh dinners.  Wild mushrooms was all he could talk about, he’s become “wild” about them!

This recipe is also filling not like some takeout foods where after eating you’re already starting to get hungry again and go scrounging in the kitchen for a little something.  This is a stick to your ribs kind of meal.

We gave this recipe a 9.5.

Jamie’s Squash & Penne Bake with Ricotta & Golden Bread Crumbs. 45 mins, level 1, 886 cal.

Before I begin about tonight’s recipe, I’d like to back up to yesterday’s Wild Mushroom & Thyme Risotto.  Food often looks better when presented on pretty dishes.  Yesterday I swiped one of my daughter’s dishes because I was tired of looking at the pictures on my black & white plates.  My daughter often chips her more squarish plates and they’re costly to replace.  So several years ago when she began managing/styling hair in a salon in a large department store I noticed that they would put china pieces on sale and in addition she’d get an employee discount.  Why do plates have to match?  They don’t and your food will look so appealing.  So if you’re using old chipped plates ditch them for pretty on sale china pieces.  Your food will look and taste great on pretty dishes.

Now to tonight’s recipe:  I’M SO SORRY JAMIE OLIVER!  I look forward to cooking his meal but I messed up big time so learn from my mistakes.  As usual I’m in a hurry and didn’t read ahead or look at the pictures…not good.  It’s the bread crumbs part I messed up.  I took it very literal when he said add a splash of EVOO to the crumbs. What Jamie meant was add enough EVOO until small bits of crumbs stick together. The bottom picture shows how it should have looked.  I added a tiny, probably about 1/2 tsp of EVOO, to the crumbs and they were still very dry and that’s the way it went on the top of the squash part.  I thought perhaps some juices would bake up, like a pie and coat the crumbs…NOT.  When it came out of the oven, the crumbs were, well, still crumbs and dry.  So my bright idea, pore EVOO on top and try to mix it, that worked, a little.  I popped it back into the oven, cranked it up to broil and in 2 minutes the crumb topping was golden brown.  The top looked great but when I plated it lots of the crumbs that had fallen into the squash part were still dry.

We still ate it and it was quite good but it could have been better if I had only added more EVOO.  We gave this old-school pasta bake a 9.

Crispy Sunchoke and Quinoa Salad with Kale and Mint. 30 mins, level 2, 535 cal.

I love Sundays.  For my husband and me it’s mostly a quiet day to do things we’ve been wanting to do around the house.  I did sewing and my husband was outside in his precious yard.  So dinners are a quiet time usually with just us and a Hello Fresh dinner and I look forward to it.  I had a glass of Sangria and tonight’s dinner went very well with it. 

As I unpacked the ingredients I came across a vegetable labeled Sunchoke.  Neither Dennis nor I had ever heard of that.  Then I find out they’re also known as Jerusalem artichokes, this time Dennis had heard of them.  I had to look them up.  They are a member of the sunflower family and taste like artichoke hearts but here’s the kicker, they cause intestinal gas!  For right now I liked the crispy crunch and light artichoke flavor.  I might not like them so much later!

This was a good, easy to prepare, hearty kind of salad.  I did substitute cilantro for the mint (I don’t like mint).  It is a fairly mild salad even with the white wine vinegar because you don’t use much but the feta and cranberries added just the right tangy sweetness.

I give the sunchoke chips a 8.5, frankly if we have “problems” later it might drop!  The salad is a 9.5.

Visit Hello Fresh to select your box for next week!  Take $40 off your first box with coupon code 7UT7K8.