I tried meal delivery company HelloFresh so you don’t have to

I didn’t even burn the building down

Meal delivery companies have been popping up all over the country recently, delivering the ingredients and recipes for a restaurant-quality meal that can be made at home. This is good news for University of Michigan students, in particular, considering Michigan’s abysmal lack of accessible and affordable grocery stores.

Unless you have a car, or a friend willing to lend theirs out to you, your grocery options are pretty limited to coordinating with an Uber or paying double the price at Replenish. As one of the carless sufferers myself, I decided to test out Hello Fresh, one of these services, to see how practical the service is.

Hello Fresh offers a choice of classic or purely vegetarian boxes, with the option to receive three, four, or five two-person meals per week. As a single person, I thought the three-meal plan would be plenty. Prior to shipping, all of the week’s ingredients are pre-portioned out and packaged by recipe.

For my first week, the five options were lemony chicken paillard with sweet potato wedges, arugula salad, and chimichurri, Italian meatloaf with sun-dried tomatoes, roasted green beans, and garlic basil mashed potatoes, steamed salmon with jeweled couscous and yogurt (a la Jamie Oliver), sugar-rubbed pork chops with caramelized root vegetables and thyme-pan sauce, and butternut squash agnolotti with apples, spinach, and sage-brown butter sauce. Since I’m not a huge fan of pork and I am a huge fan of protein, I went with the chicken, meatloaf, and salmon.

Tbh I slayed this lemony chicken paillard

The company runs under the assumption that you have a basically stocked kitchen, but indicates on each recipe exactly what you’ll need that they don’t supply. Those items tended to be olive oil, salt, pepper, an assortment of pans, and a cheese grater or zester. It also builds the recipes with a healthy, balanced lifestyle in mind, so even though the full nutrition info came with the recipe, I looked at it more out of curiosity than actual concern.

I got the shipping notification on Saturday afternoon, and the box arrived at my door around 1 pm Tuesday, three days later. To my surprise, all the ingredients were at refrigerated temperature and all the meats still frozen — probably a product of the combination of heavy amount of insulation and frozen Midwest climate.

*drools while thinking about those potatoes*

Cooking each meal was a challenge, but an enjoyable one. As a self-proclaimed elite amateur chef, there were definitely more ingredients and prep work than I’d been used to, but the prepackaged aspect turned out to be significantly much more useful than I thought it would be. It cut out any measuring, aside from boiling water, drizzles of oil, and pinches of salt and pepper, and made following the recipe pretty easy for even the most-scattered brains (like me).

As for the food? Excuse me, but I need a moment of quiet reflection, because that food was amazing. Everything tasted as if it came straight out of Gordon Ramsay’s angry hands, and there was never a flavor and blandness problem I found that couldn’t be solved by a little salt and pepper. When I closed my eyes, I felt like I was sitting at a quirky Brooklyn restaurant that let patrons wear baggy sweatpants and watch trashy reality TV.

Still salivating

One of my concerns going in was that the two-portion promise would be too good to be true, but I was definitely thoroughly impressed. Not only did each recipe actually make two meals each, but each meal was the perfect size so that I was full and satisfied after eating, but not stuffed or uncomfortable. Of course the box wasn’t perfect — the amount of dishes and counter cleanup I had to do after the fact was a little off-putting, but what I’d give just to relive those garlic mashed potatoes…

So do I recommend it? Absolutely. If you enjoy cooking, have time to spend in the kitchen three times a week, and are willing to sacrifice some of your takeout and delivery meal budget, HelloFresh is well worth the price. As a person who fits all three qualifications, I can absolutely say that having HelloFresh has made my life a little easier and a lot more adventurous and delicious.

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