Hello Fresh Vegetarian April 2016 Subscription Box Review + $50 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, which featured a recipe by Jamie Oliver! 

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.

Smoky Black Bean Cakes with Avocado Salsa and Tangy Arugula Salad. 45 mins, level 2, 594 cal.

Before I even begin to talk about the cakes I want to give a shout out to Hello Fresh for their new series of tips that you can keep as a handy reference.  So far I’ve gotten measurement conversions and where and how long to store produce.  I like the shelf life part but I live in the south on the water and if I were to keep some of the produce in the pantry or on the countertop as suggested, I’d have fruit flies coming  out of everywhere.  The only produce I keep on my counter is bananas and in the summer they go in the refrigerator after a couple of days.  Oh, garlic I can keep in the pantry, it’s not just for keeping vampires away!  Fruit flies have never bothered them in my house. 🙂

We travel to Texas a lot to see grandkids there, 2 in San Antonio and 2 in Dallas, so we eat Tex-Mex and Mexican food a lot and we’ve grown to love avocados and salsas.  The avocado that was sent was perfect in color, texture and taste.  It was the perfect compliment to the bean cakes. The cakes that I pictured were wonderful, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside: however, they were a dickens to make.  My cakes didn’t look anything like the cakes pictured on the recipe card.  They were falling apart.  I think my beans to corn ratio wasn’t correct.  Anyway, after I was able to get some cakes for the picture my husband, after watching me, decided it was too hard to make more cakes so he just dumped the remaining bean mixture in the hot oil and fried it up.  His plate wasn’t quite as pretty as mine but he was happy with the taste. 

We both complimented the flavor of this dish and we loved that it was the right amount for serving 2, absolutely no leftovers!  This dish rates a 9.

Ultimate Springtime Salad with Crisp Radish, Snap Peas, and Fresh Mozzarella. 496 cal, 35 mins, level 1.

Delicious, light, tasty, really good, what a surprise…potatoes, yummy pesto; these were some of the comments given about this salad.  I’ve mentioned before but its been months that we have a friend, Frances, who is 94.  For decades, yes I said decades,  we’ve gone out to dinner on Saturday nights with Frances, only now she doesn’t like to go out so we take food to her house on Saturday nights.  Tonight I looked at the 2 recipes left and decided this would be easy to make, transport and eat.  We paired it with a brie & Asiago cheeses and crackers and then ordered some appetizers from Applebees.  What a perfect grouping of food.    There were 6 adults at this little feast and we enjoyed almost all of it. The little bit we had left was put together as a meal for Frances tomorrow night.

This salad was the center piece, bright, colorful and delicious looking to boot!  I did do something a little different than the recipe called for.  I used a steamer for the carrots and snap peas.  I used 12 minutes for the carrots and threw in the snap peas at 6.  They were perfect.  I didn’t want to lose any nutritional value by boiling them.  I’m assuming Hello Fresh suggested boiling because not everyone owns a steamer.  Here’s my recommendation to those who don’t own a steamer…go buy one right now!  Drop what you’re doing and get to a store!!!

This salad is a springtime winner, it rates a 10.

Jamie’s Asparagus & Mushroom Risotto With Fresh Parsley & Lemon. 441 cal, level 2, 45 mins.

Could Hello Fresh make the titles of the recipes any longer?  Ha

Anyhow, my husband and I had never made or ordered risottos but now that we get Hello Fresh we’ve had several different versions.  They are all delicious.  We did like all the vegetables in Jamie’s version, we’re vegetable people.  And the little squirt of lemon…wow.  It just added that little zip of sour, perfect for the combination of vegetables.  

The finished product was pleasing to the eye, rich,oozy sauce with rice and all the green vegetables and the texture, soft rice with a bit of a crunch in the asparagus.  Wonderfully put together, this gets a 10.

Visit Hello Fresh to select your box for next week!

Currently you get can a $50 Discount on your First two Boxes with coupon code APRIL50HF! If you just want to try one box save $40 off your first box with coupon code 7UT7K8.