Hello Fresh FTW!

      

It's time to confess something. I'm 25 years old and I don't eat any vegetables. Unless you count sweet potatoes as a vegetable... I love me some sweet potatoes (with butter and brown sugar, of course).

I've never eaten vegetables. My parents fought me for several years, and I "tried" them every now and then. My mom did try some of those sneaky hidden-vegetables recipes a few times, but I never acquired the taste for veggies. (Does anyone really acquire the taste for veggies?)

Now that I'm a married woman, with a house/kitchen that's full of kitchen tools that I mostly don't know how to use, and I husband who does, in fact, like a variety of vegetables... I'm coming to accept that I need to put forth more effort into eating vegetables. My hubby is getting tired of frozen pizzas, chicken tenders, and mac & cheese dinners so we decided to give the food-delivery company Hello, Fresh a try.

A friend from high school was gracious enough to share a coupon code with me and I ordered 3 meals for our first week. They were delivered on Saturday and I opened up the box to find (drum roll, please) .... toasted rice and shrimp bowl, panko parm poulet (chicken) with potatoes, and juicy lucy burger.

I unpacked the large recipe cards, a brochure, 3 skinny boxes containing the ingredients, and the 3 proteins (not packaged in the skinny boxes). I opened each box just to see what was inside and decided even though somethings didn't need to be refrigerated, it just made things easier to keep each recipe's ingredients together until cooking time.

The brochure inside the big box had some important info- a short list of items that you will need, but don't come with the shipment. Things that were on this list included: salt & pepper, butter, oil (veggie or olive), etc.

I put all of the boxes and proteins into the fridge and made a mental note that I needed to get some butter and olive oil. While putting the food into the fridge I realized that the box that had the shrimp recipe ingredients had a little sticker on it that said "Make this 1st." (so I did).

Fast forward to Monday. I left work, picked up my dogs from doggy day camp (my parent's house), and unpacked the box of ingredients. I immediately felt overwhelmed and scared and called my mom. She lives super close and was awesome enough to come over and help me out.

I'm not an experienced cook by any means and I didn't want to burn my first Hello Fresh meal. My mom was such a huge help. I wasn't sure how to interpret some of the directions and she guided me. For instance, "drizzle some oil..." What in the World is a drizzle!?

I worked on getting the rice started while she cleaned and cut the vegetables.
The vegetables in this recipe were:
 -red bell peppers (never had them before)
 -garlic (not a veggie is it...)
 -those little onion looking things .... scallions (probs not a veggie either)
 -& corn (canned, yuck)

After the rice was off to a good start, I started cooking up the veggies in a pan and added the shrimp after my mom cleaned it for me. I didn't keep track of how long it took from start to make this meal, but it couldn't have been more than 30-35 minutes.

Once my mom clarified what a "drizzle" meant, the large recipe card was really helpful and easy to follow. I didn't burn anything and according to my husband: "It was good."

I'm always nervous when it comes to trying new food, but I promised to my hubs and myself that I would try EVERYTHING that I made from Hello Fresh. I did it. I put shrimp, rice, and red bell peppers in my mouth at the same time

                            and                     i                      didn't                       hate                it.

Shocking, right!?

Okay, I pushed the corn to the side, but I ate bell peppers y'all.
There are 2 videos to prove the events described above did actually happen and if I can figure out how to upload them on here, I will share them!

In the meantime, here are some pictures of what we ate tonight.

The Hello Fresh Photo

My Photo 

One meal down, 2 more to go for this week! Based on today's experience, we plan on continuing with Hello Fresh. Stay tuned for my review of the next recipe we try.

Until then, keep eating those veggies and I'll do my best to eat them too.

-B