HelloFresh Revisited: Double Peanut Satay Stir Fry with Thai Holy Basil & Bok Choy

Clearly I haven't been doing a great deal of cooking recently, but I've been off work for most of this week - by choice, this time, rather than through illness - and my girlfriend and I had been discussing for quite some time that this would provide the ideal opportunity for her to take a break from slaving over the hot stove, and for me to get in some more practice over that same hot stove.

Since my last couple of stints of cooking dinner were both sets of three dishes (one from Gousto, the other from HelloFresh), I figured I'd start by looking over their recipe cards, and my eyes naturally fell on my biggest failure from that batch of experiments. I always say that one learns more from a single failure than from any number of successes, but I've yet to put that properly into practice in the kitchen. The first change I made was obvious - using products I already had in stock, or were bought at the supermarket - basically things that didn't have to be wrestled out of weird 'portion-sized' packets and things that I'd gone and got for myself based on the ingredients list.

My biggest gripes about HelloFresh generally were the imprecise and illogical measures they used for some items, and the wonky order of events presented by the instructions. Having cocked it up once, I had a better idea of how and where to start, so I began by mixing the Satay sauce - 2 large tablespoons of peanut butter straight out of my kitchen cupboards, 1 tablespoon of the sweet chilli sauce lurking in my fridge, and a tablespoon of soy sauce (light or dark is not actually specified in the recipe, but the first bottle I picked up was light, so I used that) all stirred together in a small bowl. This was an interesting step, because the peanut butter in my cupboard had separated when I last used it, and stirring it thoroughly still left it roughly "the consistency of runny honey", which description was the source of just one of the issues I had the first time round. Adding the two sauces thinned it out further, but then I left the sauce aside... and while I worked on the other steps, it thickened up considerably. By the time I was doing the noodles, I really did need to add some of the boiling noodle water, but the recipe's estimate of "a couple of tbsp" wasn't entirely sufficient to correct the consistency - I ended up using four or five, and could probably have used a couple more without overly diluting the resultant sauce.

Next up came the chopping of the veg - which, as usual, took far longer than it should have done because I'm still terrible at chopping veg. I did save some time and effort by grating the ginger rather than chopping it finely, because attempting to chop things finely still really pisses me off. I put the grated ginger and the discs of the white parts of the spring onions into one small bowl since they're added together, then the red peppers (sliced not quite to half centimetre matchsticks, but close enough) and the sugar snap peas into a second bowl since they're also added together. Next up, I sliced the bok choy (or 'pak choi', as Morrisons call it) and set that aside in another bowl, then chopped up the green parts of the spring onions and put them an a small bowl of their own.

Finally, in this pageant of proper preparedness, primed to prevent a plural of poor performances, I poured a handful of dry roasted peanuts into the mortar I barely use and lightly crushed them with the pestle I rarely touch. Hey, they look nice in my kitchen, OK?

Then and only then did I start on the noodles. My girlfriend has shown me a neat trick where you boil your water in a kettle before putting it in the saucepan, and that does seem to cut down the cooking time simply because a kettle boils water far quicker than a gas hob, so the noodles could be added sooner, so their four minutes were up sooner. Again, I followed the advice of HelloFresh and put the cooked noodles into a pan of cold water to keep them ready (and loose) till they were needed.

The actual cooking part is very quick - part of the problem I had the first time round was that the fourth step of the recipe, the stir-fry, takes only a little over five minutes, but everything has to be ready and to hand so that things actually happen in the necessary quick succession.

When it came time to add the Satay sauce, I still managed to fluff things up a little: it looked at first as if there still wasn't enough (hence the impression that I could have added more of the noodle water) and by the time it was bubbling, some of it had already stuck to the bottom of my wok. Still, it mixed in nicely enough and everything seemed to get a decent coating of the sauce, so things were looking positive. I had, of course, singularly failed to tear up some basil (the normal kind, as the Thai variety was nowhere to be found in the supermarket or my local grocers), but that was soon enough accomplished. The final steps were sprinkling over the crushed nuts and the green bits of the spring onion. Still no prayers to the gods of Thai cooking, but equally no colourful oaths muttered under my breath... and my girlfriend was pleased to find I wasn't utterly losing my rag over dinner this time.

Oh, and it tasted fantastic... Much, I suspect, as it is intended...

I was especially pleased with the sauce, as I really could taste the note of ginger and the sweetness of the chilli sauce in the Satay - even the shredded basil wasn't utterly overwhelmed by the large quantity of peanut butter. The red peppers and sugar snap peas had retained some bite and the noodles were nice and soft without being gooey or gummy. It may have taken me most of a year, but I feel that I've managed to turn what I very generously considered "a kind of success" in retrospect, into the success it deserved to be, without half the stress I'd expected considering how long it's been since I last cooked. It all proceeded far more smoothly than the first time, I felt calmer, more confident and in control all the way through... the only downside was the mess left over in the wok... but most of that will come off through soaking.

This is definitely a recipe that I'd like to try again sometime, making a few subtle changes: the ginger was possibly grated a little too finely, almost to a paste, and I'll probably add a bit more water to the Satay sauce as I cook the noodles... maybe even use different veg.

My biggest regret with this second attempt at the recipe is that, yet again, I didn't take any photos. To be honest, though, what I served up wasn't as tidy-looking as the photo on the recipe card, so it still wouldn't have looked half as good as it tasted.

Experiments with HelloFresh #2: Double Peanut Satay Stir Fry with Thai Holy Basil & Bok Choy

Wow. Honestly, I though it would only be a couple of weeks - at most - before I got round to this, but it's actually been two months.

Go, me!

While the original plan was to write up these three recipes on or near the day I tried them out, this one left me so frustrated and angry that I barely spoke to my girlfriend all evening. At the time, it felt like an unmitigated disaster (unmitigated, that is, except inasmuch as it was actually edible, and not unpleasant) because so many things went wrong during the process, and I felt the instructions weren't as clear as they could be. This was my first serious run-in with the... creative... measurement system employed by HelloFresh, where they use non-standard 'cup' sizes and, I suspect, non-standard tablespoon sizes (or, at least, they consider one tablespoon to be one 'man-sized', heaped tablespoon. This led to a situation where I discovered all too late in the process that I hadn't prepared enough sauce, so I had to hastily throw together another batch, which I could no longer easily do because some things were no longer available to me.

Step by step, it seemed to go remarkably well. In fact, the very first step was a complete eye-opener for me for the simple reason that it recommended keeping the cooked noodles in cold water to prevent them cooking further and - though it doesn't actually state this - also from sticking together in a terrible, gelatinous, noodley lump.

The second step - the preparation of the sauce - is where it started to go wrong, because it asks for two tablespoons of peanut butter. Now, I took one look at the two enormous sachets of peanut butter provided and thought "well, I'm only going to need one of these", and I was very, very wrong.

It also said to add a tablespoon or two of the boiling water cooking the noodles to bring the sauce to "the consistency of runny honey". I don't know what kind of runny honey they were thinking of, because my mixture achieved what I would have considered to be the 'correct' consistency without any added water. My mistake, again. It wasn't so much about the consistency as the volume of sauce though, I concede, had I used both sachets of peanut butter, I may well have needed the water.

As with some of the other recipes, I'd been clever and pre-chopped all the veg and the ginger, neatly slicing the bok choy with our mandolin, so the actual stir-fry steps should have proceeded smoothly, and I guess I have only my own clumsiness to blame for the amount of veg that ended up flying all over the kitchen.

But when it came time to add in the satay sauce, it became quickly apparent that there just wasn't enough. Within moments of adding it and starting to stir it in, it seemed to vanish. My attempt at mixing up a new batch was doomed to fail because (a) the only ingredients I had left over were the second sachet of peanut butter and some soy sauce from my own cupboards, (b) I had to do it incredibly quickly because (c) the stir fry was in the process of frying. Already somewhat flustered, I didn't immediately think to turn the heat down (or, y'know, off) while I mixed up more 'sauce', and the realisation slowly dawned that I should have increased the volume of sauce by adding boiling water as the recipe had suggested.

Nevertheless, the second batch of peanut-soy-sauce got dumped in and stirred about for a few minutes before I decided to stop for fear of utterly ruining the meal by burning it. I served it up and slammed a bowl down in front of my girlfriend before curling up into a semi-defensive posture around my own bowl, seething over every mouthful. Far from being a 'Double Peanut Satay Stir Fry', it was basically 'Peanut Butter Veg with Noodles'. Because of all this, I didn't take any photos... Just trust me when I say it looked nothing like the photo on the recipe card.

Of course, time being the great healer - not to mention the third and final recipe actually going quite well - I look back on this experience with a much better humour, and rather want to try it again. None of the ingredients are exactly hard to come by, even if I were to shop locally rather than at a supermarket (in fact, given the abundance of greengrocers near me, shopping locally might be the better option), so it'd just be a matter of assembling the ingredients and cracking on.

I'm still rather put out by the - frankly, arrogant - redefining of standard measures that HelloFresh have undertaken, especially considering how casual they've been about it. That said, given a bit more time and more experience of their quirks, I could certainly do a better job of it than I did this first time. I'm not sure I'll be whispering any little prayers to the gods of Thai cooking, but I may well be muttering oaths under my breath.

So, overall, I'd have to consider this a kind of success, because it was edible, actually tasted quite good even if it didn't taste 'right', and it didn't put me off cooking entirely. Significant caveats there may be, but the recipe itself is pretty good, and one terrible experience out of three doesn't change the fact that, as a service, HelloFresh has lots of potential.

If you think you might fancy giving HelloFresh a try (and are within the UK mainland), please feel free to use my referral code MPMDQT for an introductory discount. Yes, that also gets me a discount on my next order, but further deliveries are currently on hold while I complete this first set of recipes and consider how this system fits in with my current... erm... 'lifestyle'.

Experiments with HelloFresh #3: Fennel & Olive Fettuccine with Fresh Parsley

No, I haven't forgotten how to count, this should really have been the final post, but I'm temporarily skipping the second for reasons I'll get into when I finally post it. I'll also do the summing-up with that post rather than this one, as it'll make more sense that way.

As much as anything on this blog makes sense, that is.

After doing things in my usual haphazard fashion on the first recipe, my girlfriend mentioned that, when she's cooking, she'll often do snippets of preparatory chopping throughout the day, by way of a five minute break from her studies. While I wasn't quite that organised, I did make a start on this earlier in the evening than with any of my previous efforts, and did most of the chopping in advance of any of the actual cooking. I also followed another bit of her advice: she'd seen and heard my frustration with all the 'finely chop ingredient x' malarky in the first post and, when it came to the garlic, she suggested I simply use our garlic press. The end result is basically the same, if not better, and saves on an awful lot of effort. It was also nice to have a genuine reason to use my mortar and pestle for a change, grinding the fennel seeds - I knew I'd bought it for a reason...

I was particularly tickled, too, when the instructions helpfully suggested a mandolin for thinly slicing the fennel. My girlfriend picked one up a while back and, while it's not quite fine enough to generate the 'almost translucently thin' slices the instructions specified, it certainly made short work of slicing the awkwardly-shaped fennel bulb.

Once the chopping was out of the way, I read through the instructions several times over. Unlike the first two recipes, there weren't any massive glitches in the ingredient quantities (although specifying '2 cups' of sliced fennel bulb seemed redundant considering only one bulb was provided, and I kinda had to use the whole thing one way or another), so I really just wanted to be sure of what I needed to do next at every step, and to get a vague idea of the timings before starting things off. The second step in the recipe is cooking the red pepper strips, for which it recommends "15 mins or until lightly charred on the outside". The next step is cooking the rest of the veg in a pan, eventually turning it into a sauce for the pasta. The timings seemed to match up pretty well, so I started each process almost simultaneously, just to see if I could keep things on track.

The sauce comes together in several short stages that I found reasonably easy to follow since I had everything ready-prepared around me. The only hitch I'd had was that this recipe calls for black olives, and I definitely didn't get any black olives in the box. Thankfully, my girlfriend really likes olives, so we tend to have some in stock. The only real difficulty then was that, again, it specified the olive content as '2 tablespoons', which I still say is an utterly ridiculous measure for bisected fruit. Still, the definition gleaned from the first recipe helped me choose the appropriate number of olives for this dish. When the tinned tomatoes are added to the pan, the recipe suggests adding sugar but I've never found that necessary - tomatoes are sweet enough and, coupled with the rest of the veg, there's enough sugar in there naturally for my tastebuds. And that's saying something.

Once everything is in the pan, the recipe instructs that the heat should be turned down low so the sauce can boil down and thicken up, and it's at this point that the pasta needs to be cooked. Personally, I found it amusing that the card includes a definition of 'al dente' under the heading 'Tip', but your mileage may vary.

Just to prove that I'm not consistently terrible at cooking, the pasta was done only moments before the oven's alarm went off to tell me that the red pepper strips were ready, so both elements were added to the sauce in the pan in good time. The final stage was chucking in the parsley and the cheese (which strikes me as odd, and one of the Gousto recipes did the same, where my girlfriend and I would normally tend to add the cheese on top, once the meal had been served... not least because it means you don't end up having to scrape congealed cheese off your pan when you do the washing up). With a final garnish of - oh, for fuck's sake - 'finely chopped' fennel fronds, dinner was served...

Based on the two recipes I bothered photographing myself, I have to conclude that there's something wrong with HelloFresh's photography or their Photoshop work, as both this and the 'Easter' Ragu were depicted as rather brown in the stock photos, while they tended more toward red when I'd finished cooking... and I'm pretty sure I didn't get anything that significantly wrong on either of these.

As we were eating, my girlfriend commented that the fennel was identifiable in the sauce, but not overpowering, as fennel can sometimes be - being almost licorice in flavour. I certainly enjoyed the dish, but have to say I found it rather bland overall... it's possible I gave it too few "good grinds of black pepper", or that the chilli was just cooked for too long - it didn't have the spicy kick I was expecting, given that the first instruction says to "finely chop as much of the chilli as you dare". Perhaps I'll have to try this one again, and deliberately try to spice it up as much as possible...

This was definitely the easiest of the three HelloFresh recipes for me to follow, though how much of that was down to me doing more preparatory work in advance, and how much was because the recipe is actually easier, I cannot say. What I will say is that the card reckons this should be done in about 25 minutes, and I took the best part of an hour over it. Admittedly, most of that was due to taking my time over the preparatory work and my neurotic re-reading of the instructions, but that's a hell of a discrepancy. Not to say I particularly rate myself as any kind of kitchen ninja, but the folks at HelloFresh do seem to presume a level of competence far higher than mine.

Probably the neatest presentation I've ever managed when cooking
for myself and my girlfriend...

If you think you might fancy giving HelloFresh a try (and are within the UK mainland), please feel free to use my referral code MPMDQT for an introductory discount. Yes, that also gets me a discount on my next order, but further deliveries are currently on hold while I complete this first set of recipes and consider how this system fits in with my current... erm... 'lifestyle'.

Experiments with HelloFresh #1: Greek Easter Ragu with Almond, Aubergine & Basil Couscous

Around the time I was making a start on my trio of Gousto posts, I was planning my first foray into HelloFresh. On the surface, both offer much the same sort of service, with a different range of recipes and a very different style of presentation. From the moment of delivery (quite late in the day, on their 0900-1700 delivery 'slot'), HelloFresh appears to be more of a brand, with a personalised box containing not only ingredients and recipes but a welcome booklet introducing the HelloFresh team and their suppliers, as well as offering hints and tips for getting the most out of the service. There was also a copy of their monthly newsletter, The Fresh Times, and a whole slew of advertising flyers offering discount codes for clothing, beers and a 'smoothie starter pack' courtesy of partner companies... some of whom also seem to share the design agency used by HelloFresh, as the style of their flyers is more than a little similar.

But, while I may work in publishing and occasionally spend my days creating such flyers, I'm not here to critique that aspect of the product. Hell, I'd need a whole new blog if I wanted to get into that...

The original Grand Plan for trying out HelloFresh was that I'd put the order in so that my first delivery would arrive while I was taking time off work, and then cook every weeknight during my holiday - not only to give my girlfriend a rest, but to keep up my culinary confidence and give myself a little more to write about on this little foodie blog of mine. Naturally, this being real life, things didn't quite work out that way and, rather than ordering five nights of meals I ordered only three. On the upside, this probably makes for a more balanced comparison with Gousto. Also, since I chose the vegetarian option, all three recipies were for dishes both my girlfriend and I could enjoy equally, without having to find substitute ingredients for anything.

Since Easter was only a few days ago, the first recipe I tried was the one featuring the word 'Easter' in the name... not that I have any idea why...

I made my first mistake before even starting to cook, in that the recipe cards arrived in a cardboard wallet and, clearly having a bad day, I failed to notice on which side the wallet was open, and so I tore it open via the glued flap. You could say that sets the tone for the entire experiment but, as I write, I've only tried two of the three recipes, and I'm hoping the last will go better.

Each recipe card is digitally printed on an oddly-sized sheet of light card, with a nice, large photo of the finished dish - as it's intended to look - along with a pictorial list of required ingredients and an estimated preparation time. The back of the card features the ingredients list - including notes on potential allergens - a nutritional breakdown and, of course, the instructions. There are also photos, but only four running down the lefthand side of the card, so not every step in the process is accompanied by a photo. That's not necessarily a problem, as some steps hardly require illustrating. I know I said I wasn't going to critique the design but, if I can complain about holes being punched through timing instructions on one of the Gousto cards, I feel it is within my rights to complain about a terrible and avoidable text orphan on one of these - the last word in one of the steps sits, on its own, at the top of the second column, looking a bit silly.

This 'Easter Ragu' was supposed to take only 35 minutes but, as usual, it took me a hell of a lot longer because I'm terrible at chopping and didn't organise myself very well. I'm not sure how much longer it took, but I'd guess the total time can't have been much short of an hour.

Part of that would be the difficulty I had in locating some of the ingredients. At first, I thought at least two - the tomato purée and feta cheese, specifically - were missing, but my girlfriend found one and I later found the other myself. Some of the ingredients - particularly those coming in plastic sachets - are branded products, and therefore very easy to identify... others are plain bagged and labelled with little stickers... still others are just plain bagged. The feta was the only content of a cool bag which I'd assumed was included to keep some of the loose veg cool and fresh, while the tomato puree just looked remarkably like one of the ingredients for another recipe, as both were reddish substances in plain sachets.

The first instruction is to pre-heat the oven, but the oven only comes into play - for 20 minutes - at the end of the third step. My oven tends to heat up quickly enough that I rarely, if ever pre-heat... though that's more because I know I'm going to be slower than the recipe expects on the intermediate steps.

I also groan inwardly whenever the instruction 'chop finely' or 'finely dice' appears in a recipe because my knife-wielding skills are pretty dire. 'Fine' is something I have yet to achieve... 'haphazard' is more my style. This recipe calls for just about all the veg to be 'finely diced', from the garlic to the aubergine, while the basil was to be 'finely chopped'.

Let's just say I chopped them all... OK?

The aubergine was a particular trial as my kitchen knives - seriously in need of sharpening at this point - had great difficulty penetrating the aubergine's skin, and yet came perilously close to penetrating mine, with alarming ease, on a couple of occasions.

My problems with the aubergine didn't end there, though, as the 20 minutes of baking was probably a little too long in my oven, any the coating I gave them of olive oil was inadequate to prevent large amounts of it sticking to the foil on my baking tray.

The remainder of the recipe went smoothly enough, even though I had to substitute a tablespoon of tomato purée from my own stock, as the sachet supplied didn't become visible to me until the next day. I did wrestle with the quantities specified, as they tend to use 'cups' as a measure, but their website states that they use a 300ml coffee mug as their 'cup', which is larger than the 'standard' US cup size (not that I'm especially familiar with them) and so somewhat confusing. Bizarrely, the recipe specifies '2 cups' of chopped aubergine, but only one aubergine was supplied, and I'd say that amounted to substantially less than 2 cups, by their measures. It also specifies '1 cup' of tomato passata, but two 200g cartons were supplied and I didn't feel like trying to be precise about measuring out part of a carton, potentially letting the remainder go to waste.

Also, in my humble opinion, any recipe that measures green olives by tablespoons (when 2 sachets were provided) is just insane.

Nevertheless, the process was fairly simple, if a little messy at times, and I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised to find that the couscous had behaved exactly as it should have - soaking up the stock - in the time it had taken me to breeze through the complicated parts of the recipe.

As I was getting ready to serve it all up, I forewarned my girlfriend that it would be coming without the feta as it appeared not to have been supplied. Thankfully, she fished it out of its hiding place within about five seconds, because she was a bit more thorough in her investigation of the packaging than I had been. Swiftly and inexpertly crumbling the soft cheese over our portions, adding a few more bits of basil ripped from the remaining sprigs, our first HelloFresh vegetarian dinner may not have been pretty, but the end result of a fairly confused period of flailing in the kitchen was completely delicious.

Aside from the couscous, which I found quite bland... and I wonder if I should have used the entire stock pot, rather than the half specified. Then again, couscous tends to be intentionally bland, and one wouldn't want it to overpower the ragu. I'll definitely try this recipe again, probably doing certain things a little differently, to see if I can improve upon my first attempt.

Definitely not the same colour as the photo on the card,
and certainly not as tidily-presented, but very tasty.

I am utterly flummoxed by the name of this dish, and how it relates to 'Easter'... but also the structure and punctuation of the name seem misleading to me - the almond and aubergine are part of the ragu, not the couscous, so surely it should be "Greek Easter Ragu with Almond & Aubergine, served with Basil Couscous"?

If you think you might fancy giving HelloFresh a try (and are within the UK mainland), please feel free to use my referral code MPMDQT for an introductory discount. Yes, that also gets me a discount on my next order, but further deliveries are currently on hold while I complete this first set of recipes and consider how this system fits in with my current... erm... 'lifestyle'.