Hello Fresh Vegetarian March 2016 Subscription 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 for both casual and dedicated vegetarians.  This review covers the vegetarian box! 

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.

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.  Note that the recipes created for Hello Fresh by Jaime Oliver, an English celebrity chef and healthier food advocate, are written slightly differently than the normal Hello Fresh recipes.

Mushroom and Spinach Flatbread with Fresh Mozzarella, Garlic, and Parmesan. 35 mins, level 2, 720 cal.

Craving pizza, just not the ordinary run of the mill Italian pizza sauce, pepperoni and cheese variety? Me too, actually, all the time. Now my husband, on the other hand, could eat pizza 5 times a week, yes the ordinary stuff.  I ate enough of that as a teen and into my 20’s that I only want it maybe once a month.  But fancy flatbread, now that’s another story.  I love thin crust pizza so flatbread is for me, I roll mine pretty thin and pile on the veggies.  Yup, now that’s a pizza!

In  case you’re wondering pizza and flatbread are both made from dough, stretched thin and then put toppings on them.  Flatbreads tend to be more experimental where pizza is more classic.

This Hello Fresh flatbread had a bunch of cooked vegetables that were perfectly paired together: mushrooms, onion, garlic and spinach.  Heaven on baked dough.

Yum, rated a 9.5.

French Lentil Salad. 30mins, level 1, 672 cal.

It’s been a very busy weekend at my house and we’ve gone out to dinner the last 3 nights in a row and have had grandkids over for 5 days.  So I was hoping for an uncomplicated delicious filling dinner and I got it with this.  Let me start with, my grandkids are very fussy finicky eaters so I knew just by looking at the picture that there’s no way they were going to eat this meal (what a shame).  So while making this dish I was also making a quick spaghetti dinner for them, no problem both were easy.

The description on the card says this is a weeknight dinner…not so!  It was great for a busy Sunday also.

The flavors were plentiful yet not one was over powering the otheres. I particularly liked the Balsamic Vinegar and my husband picked up on the honey and Feta.  Interesting, isn’t it how he picked up on the honey flavor and I couldn’t taste it at all  and yet he didn’t help prepare tonight’s dinner (babysitting) and didn’t know I had used it?

Once again I also liked the way Hello Fresh slices Brussel sprouts.  I always cooked them whole and I swear they taste so much better this way.

This was a 9.75.

Chickpea Tikka Masala. 30 mins, level 1, 634 cal.

I do believe Hello Fresh messed up in some way just not sure which way that was!  Anyway, while I was preparing all the vegetables for the Masala (Masala is an Indian dish, Marsala is an Italian dish) I realized there were no green beans in the pictures for the Masala.  Did the chef mean to put them in this recipe?  They are listed on the front and back and in the directions but not the pictures.  I of course Googled it and there are some Masala recipes with green beans in them so I’m thinking the chef did want them in the recipe.  Maybe he tried it both ways and they took pictures of the Masala with and without!  There is a mystery here.  Hmmmmm

Mystery or not, this was a great recipe, easy and great to the pallet.  My husband brought home a friend for lunch.  He loved it, said he’d never had chickpeas before and he’s my age…imagine that, never having chickpeas.  Which means he’s never had hummus, how has he survived?

So this served me and 2 grown men.  Our guest said he was a good kind of full.

I used the whole serrano pepper and it certainly wasn’t too hot at all, I didn’t even break a sweat. The chef also included directions on how to cook the rice which I totally appreciate.  The rice cooked up perfectly.

This was a 9.  Happy eating!

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