Four Insights I Gained Through Hello Fresh.

Food subscription services have blown up in the last few years and at first, I didn't really see why. Why don't you just find a recipe online and go and buy the ingredients for yourself, you know? But over time, I've become more intrigued so I thought why not give it a go before dismissing it entirely and I was very surprised to learn a few things from the experience. In the next few weeks, I am planning to write about my overall experience with Hello Fresh (because I wanted to try it out for a while before doing a full review) but today I will be solely focused on the four most important insights that I have learned throughout the process and what I’ll be able to take away from it all, outside of a weekly or fortnightly box.

To give a very brief overview on why I wanted to try a food subscription service out, was because it's very popular and it obviously is for a reason. As mentioned, I didn't see the attraction for quite a long time, but then again, I wasn't going out of my way to find new recipes that I would never try. I would stick to what I knew, and I would leave my partner to try new vegan meals for us. He is such an incredible chef at home, and in all honesty (and I have told him this), I felt sub-par to him because he would make all these delicious meals but I would stick to the same three I knew, and in my eyes, they never lived up to his meals.

For me, I wanted to try and build my confidence with cooking and as someone who sticks to a recipe to the absolute tee; I knew that having a few options to choose from was better for me, I would have all the ingredients picked for me and the recipe card has all the instructions. What would be a better way to boost my confidence in the kitchen than to have everything right there in front of me with no stress of running around the supermarket and spending hours online trying to find the perfect recipe? (Once a perfectionist, always a perfectionist...)

Adding herbs and spices to every meal.

I don't know about you, but I currently have a huge envy for really organised pantry cupboards. You know the ones; all the dry food is organised neatly with nicely written labels and the spices are all sitting full in the same sized containers, it looks like a dream. Spice racks in the kitchen are also incredible looking but I always thought "who needs that many spices?", I've only ever used three at one time and I never knew what each one added to a dish. Now when I make the same dish twice and don't use the spice that you first had, I can instantly tell. Spices really are the special ingredient needed for every dish, and you don't need every single one you can buy at the supermarket, but it's great to have variety in your rack or your cupboard to improve on any dish.

Controlling our portion sizes.

For both my partner and I, we've always had dinner and felt really stuffed afterwards and we had never really questioned it before, I guess we had grown up always feeling really full after dinner and we thought that's the way it was supposed to be. We would always watch about two episodes of a series that we're currently on before we would do anything else, so our stomachs could settle. What we've now learned is that our portion sizes were much bigger than they needed to be, and after one of these meals; yes we feel full but we don't feel so stuffed that we can't do anything for an hour or two.

All your ingredients are transferrable over different dishes.

When you first get your bags from your subscription service, you will always have the exact amount of spices but you'll notice when you go to buy the same spice in the shops, that the one spice will last you months. (Just make sure it doesn't last you years, there are use by dates for a reason!)

When you go to the supermarket to buy what you need for a meal you are re-making, you'll pick up a whole garlic which could last you over four or five meals depending on how much you use it. It's also the case if you buy a bag of potatoes, you can repurpose the ones you don't need right now, for another meal later on in the week. For me, this is where meal planning really comes into play. I meal planned a lot when I was making my own lunches every day but I would batch cook one meal and have it five days a week, and it was never boring to me because I didn't have a lot of go-to recipes to switch things up. Now, I couldn't imagine having the same meal five days in a row for weeks on end for my lunch, so thinking ahead for your recipe planning is key.

You don't need lots of ingredients to make a meal.

One of the best things about expanding your cooking range now, more than ever, is knowing that you don't need twenty ingredients for one dish.

When I was younger, my Mum had so many cook books and while they didn't all have photographs in them, most of them did, and they all looked delicious. However, when you would actually look at the ingredients, it almost filled an entire page and it was overwhelming. With food subscription services like Hello Fresh and even more contemporary cook books (I am a huge fan of Deliciously Ella's recipes), there isn't lots of ingredients and it makes that shopping list so much simpler when you go to the supermarket (or when you are re-making the Hello Fresh recipe, you still don't need to buy lots of ingredients).

So far, I've loved my experience with Hello Fresh, and I was really surprised about that. As mentioned at the beginning, I'm wanting to trial it out for a few more weeks so I have a balanced review, so look out for that one coming soon. (And of course, this isn't a sponsored post and no affiliate links have been used but if they were, they would have been clearly labelled at the beginning.)

Have a wonderful day!