New Family Box by

HelloFresh

​I’m not going to pretend we, as a family, have a gold-star culinary repertoire. While we don’t have any vegetarians, vegans, pescatarians, macro-biotics, gluten/dairy intolerants, sugar free or raw only eaters, what we lack in marvelously millennial food-groups we make up for in fussy eaters!

Add time poor, activity rich, inspiration challenged into the (underused) blender and you’ll often find the kids scoffing a shop bought pizza 10 minutes before football training or a “I don’t like this!” pasta dish as we dash in from athletics. With little time to think of wondrous new recipes, shop for the ingredients and then prepare the meal – it leaves us with some questionably nutrition-void meal options on a rotation to make Oliver Twist’s work-house fodder enviable! Between the hot-dogs and fried chicken, we manage to muster a veg filled fajita or a roast dinner here and there, to quell my inner Deliciously Ella – but that takes time, major effort and a lot of pudding based promises to get the food in the small people!

Recently, while on a “we will eat goodness”, plant-based gastronomic rage I attempted a simple looking Hemsley + Hemsley Butternut Squash Malaysian Curry- 3x village shops, 1x Amazon delivery, 5x new spices, £30+ and 3hrs later, my culinary masterpiece was met with “it’s a little bit tasteless mummy!”.  Nothing deflates one’s domestic goddess balloon like that of a 9 year-old’s scathing critique.

We needed something in between – something sandwiched between the frozen, quick-fix, childish food of dreams and the laborious, sweat and tears seasoned conscience suppressor meals. And as ever, the World Wide Web had already found the filling to my sandwich conundrum – HelloFresh!

We trialed the HelloFresh Family Box for 4 weeks – 4 meals for 4 people delivered every week. Created with busy families and fussy eaters in mind – the HelloFresh Family box is not just stuffed with goodness thanks to the HelloFresh nutritionist (some of the meals actually had 3 or 4 of our 5-a-day!), the recipes have been created by the HelloFresh in-house chef Andre who also happens to be a dad and road-tested by kids. The boxes contained tasty recipes with a little less spice for the kids but the option of adding flavoursome twists for the more adventurous at our table.

Things we loved about the HelloFresh Family Box:

Not just for dinner! We had ours delivered on a Thursday, which was perfect for the weekends. With Saturdays and Sundays being busy football days in our house, the HelloFresh meals allowed us to prepare a home-cooked, healthy and hearty lunch for the kids – instead of the usual post-match pitch-stop at a golden coloured letter! Freeing up the afternoon and meaning only a lighter dinner was needed.

Teaching an old dog new tricks! I’ve learnt some great new ways to prepare veg and meat thanks to the recipe cards – who knew gnocchi didn’t have to be slimy?! Brown it off in a pan for a bit of bite on the outside – perfect with bolognaise for a change!

Inspiration Station! I’ve kept hold of the recipe cards, and have now got 16 new meal ideas in my culinary arsenal!

Even the kids can do it! As each ingredient is pre-measured/weighed, it was really easy for the boys to get involved.

So there you have it – how I’m getting home-cooked goodness into the boys with a little less stress and, a miraculous drop in the “I don’t like this” comments!

This post was sponsored by HelloFresh who also kindly supplied us with a free 4 week trial of their new family box. As ever, I wouldn’t recommend this if I didn’t think you’d love it and benefit from it and all comments/anecdotes/opinions are my own!