Hello Fresh Vegetarian Box Review + Coupon – January 2016

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 love a nice cut of meat, we do appreciate a well-conceived vegetarian dish and its contribution to good health.  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! 

We love to show the ice in the bottom of the shipping container, because it usually sits atop a pile of meat!  With the vegetarian box, the concern is usually more with keeping items from freezing than it is keeping it very cold.  Packaging the recipes in separate boxes and putting the ice below a cardboard partition helps greatly in keeping everything cold, but unfrozen.

Hello Fresh has great instructions, and they are easy to follow even if you are a novice 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 left half of the above photo shows the instructions for the recipe created for Hello Fresh by Jaime Oliver, an English celebrity chef and healthier food advocate — I noticed the recipe was parsed differently than usual and written with a slightly different voice, leading me to conclude that Jamie actually contributed the recipe.  Also supporting this view was the fact that the recipe used half or most of the packaged items, essentially converting American packaging to more reserved English portions.

The card-stock windowed boxes used by Hello Fresh keep all the ingredients for the recipes in order, and they stack nicely in the fridge.  We like to pull out the items that don’t need refrigeration, but the boxes keep everything together.  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.

Jamie’s Cool Mexican Bean Wraps with Bell Peppers, Tomatoes & Chili. 40 mins, level 2, 503 cal.

This was the dish contributed by Jamie Oliver.  It was very light and had a bright and creamy sense to it.  Being accustomed to heavier dishes, we yearned for a little more cheese in the dish, though there was a fair amount.  The sweet bell peppers and nicely contrasting textures of the dish made it satisfying for healthy dish.

Roasted Cauliflower Steaks with Bulgur, Tzatziki, and Spiced Oil. 35 mins, level 1, 500 cal.

The combination of protein-rich bulgur, yogurt, and pumpkin seeds lent a hearty character to this dish.  The cauliflower wasn’t large enough  to get several true steaks, but I was able to cut a couple nice slabs and have a bunch of deliciously caramelized crowns to go with them.  I improved a little by tossing the unaccounted-for extra lemon in the oven to roast with the cauliflower, since it seemed to go with the mediterranean vibe of the dish.  

Apart from the limited color palate of roasted cauliflower on bulgur, this was an exceptional dish.  The flavors were nice, and the texture was superb.  It was also extremely satisfying, even for carnivores.

Roasted Beet and Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese, Arugula, and Walnuts. 30 mins, level 1, 602 cal.

This very textural said combines some of the best themes in the farm-to-table salad world.  The beet and feta combo evokes the delightful flavors of the now-ubiquitous beet and goat cheese salad, while the the walnuts and roasted potatoes are some of the best garnishes one could want.   All this sits atop hearty and creamy lentils and crisp arugula.  We loved that the beets arrived pre-cooked, but we wish the lentils were, too (the last time Brandy made this they sent a can of lentils).

We really enjoyed this vegetarian trio.  It was hearty, flavorful, and had a great balance of textures and flavors.  It is admittedly difficult to come up with satisfying vegetarian options on your own, particularly if you are only a part-time vegetarian, so we find Hello Fresh to be an excellent way to make it easy.

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