If you know me well, it's no secret that meal planning and cooking are NOT my favorite thing to do. I'm actually a pretty good cook, but since having children cooking has become a chore and much less of a passion. Meal planning, shopping, AND preparing a meal all while taking care of young children is hard. While it's hard and very time consuming, it's also incredibly important to me that I feed my family healthy and nutritious meals. It's a struggle (and a pressure!) that I'm sure every mom feels.
Recently, I've been majorly failing in the meal planning department. We have been so busy on the weekends (when I normally meal plan) that I end up running to the grocery store on Monday mornings and throwing a bunch of random stuff into my cart. Dinners are scattered and hectic and I feel so much guilt when I don't have a meal ready when Eric gets home. He works so hard all day so that I am able to stay home with our daughters, so having dinner ready for him is important to me. It's like my way of saying, "thanks for working so hard for us today babe!"
We recently tried out
Hello Fresh and I've been dying to share our experience because the week that we used the service was incredible. I didn't have to plan or shop for a thing, every ingredient and recipes showed up at my door, and dinner was ready and waiting when Eric got home each night. The meals were healthy and SO delicious and I think we might be hooked for life.
Hello Fresh is a meal delivery service that plans and shops for your meals. They send you a box full of all the ingredients you'll need plus easy step-by-step recipes for each meal. The meals are all full of fresh ingredients and are all dietitian approved.
I assumed that the meals would be pretty straight forward (as in easy to prepare) and taste good. My biggest concern was portion size. Because the meals are so "healthy", I worried that they would also be tiny! I was so relieved when our box showed up and I realized how much food they sent for each meal! The meat sizes were very generous (which Eric loved) and a few times we even had a little bit of leftovers (which Eric also loved). The food was so incredibly flavorful, much more flavorful than something I could have thought up on a weeknight. They were also super kid friendly, our girls ate all of the meals that we chose.
Each meal took me about thirty minutes to prepare and cook. Which is about as much time as I can get away with before one of my girls becomes needy. None of the meals were super complicated and the recipes were very easy to follow. There was a little vegetable chopping involved with each recipe and that was about the hardest part. I think it's because I felt so much more relaxed about cooking, but it actually felt fun preparing the meals! And the girls even pulled chairs up and helped me make two of the meals. And by "help", I mean making a massive mess but they had a lot of fun ;). There are different plans you can choose from depending on the size of your family, you can see the plans
here. We went with the family plan and it was perfect.
We absolutely plan on using Hello Fresh again! If I'm being totally honest, we probably couldn't afford to use it every week (although I wish we could!!). But we could definitely use it a week or two a month, trying to plan on using it during busier weeks when planning, shopping, and cooking is too stressful. I felt so good about feeding my family quality, healthy meals when we used the service. And not having to spend the time planning and shopping for meals was amazing.
I highly recommend trying out
Hello Fresh, I promise you will not be disappointed in the food! Eric and I were talking after we had tried it for a week and we both thought this would be the perfect service to gift someone when they have a baby! Cooking is so hard right after having a baby, but you're craving yummy home cooked meals. Obviously it's a great service to use anytime, but that popped into both our heads after using the service and realizing how much easier it makes life!
Just for you guys, you can save $35 off of your first box with code BABYBROWN35 (how generous is that!). And after thinking back about all the yummy Hello Fresh food that we ate, I'm starving now! Time to go order another box!
Cherry glazed pork chops with cous cous. They were seriously DELISH!
I partnered with Hello Fresh for this post, but all opinions are 100% my own!