May 2016 Hello Fresh Vegetarian 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, 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.

There are even some kitchen tips included in the information card. This one includes a chart to show the hotness level of different types of peppers.

Everything in this box!

Mediterranean Quinoa Bowl With Kale Chips, Olives And Feta. 25 minutes, level 1, 548 calories per serving.
Once again I almost blew it!  Hello Fresh sends you a package and you have to look at the amount to actually use.  I cooked all the quinoa but only needed to use 3/4 cup.  I started to dump all the cooked quinoa into the pan and realized all the cooked goodies would be hidden so I quickly looked at the recipe and low and behold, I only needed some of what I cooked.  Do you know how fun it is to pick out quinoa from the other cooked food?  So anyway, I saved the unused quinoa for the next day and made another salad with it.  I love that stuff!

I’ve made kale chips before but my husband never seemed to like them.  This time…he couldn’t get enough of them.  Don’t know why but I’ll take it.

 
This was a really tasty dish and we certainly enjoyed all of it, no leftovers for this family (unless you’re counting the unused quinoa!).  We rate this dish a 10.

Rigatoni Al Forno With Roasted Eggplant, Fresh Mozzarella, And Basil. 35 minutes, level 1, 718 calories per serving.

I didn’t grow up with a lot of Italian type foods, I knew spaghetti, lasagna and elbow macaroni.  So bear with me when I say I’m not a huge fan of this big pasta, rigatoni.  I think I would have been absolutely crazy about this dish if we had used a smaller pasta so I could have had a bite of pasta with the other ingredients.  As it was I either had a mouthful of pasta or a mouthful of the other.

My other problem and perhaps it was my oven but my mozzarella didn’t melt as much as we would have liked.  I didn’t want to broil the pan any more as the topping was a wonderful golden brown. When I make this dish again, I’ll shred the mozzarella.

Even though it seems I’m starting out negative, I guess I am, I can’t say enough about this dish. The taste was fabulous for so few ingredients.  The textures of the pasta, creaminess of the cheese, wonderful crunch of the golden brown topping all came together for a great dish.  This is the type of dish you could serve to anyone and they’ll be asking for your recipe!

We rated this dish a 10.

I didn’t mix it like an ordinary garden salad nor did I arrange the ingredients in rows, I layered them.  And then the directions said to drizzle on the lemon-Dijon dressing that’s when I realized my dressing was more like the consistency of peanut butter.  So I added some more olive oil but still that wasn’t enough but I didn’t want too much oil so I added some water.  Not quite to the drizzling fluidity yet but it fell out of the bowl in little gobs so now my salad was complete.  And I also sauteed my red onions,  my stomach just can’t handle raw red onions.

While my salad wasn’t quite the classic nicoise salad, it was pretty and according to my husband, great.  This rated a 9.5.

 Have you tried Hello Fresh? Currently you get can a $50 Discount on your First two boxes with coupon code HELLOMAY50! If you just want to try one box save $40 off your first box with coupon code 7UT7K8.

Visit Hello Fresh to select your box for next week!