To preface: I am not a huge fan of cooking. Besides making ramen on weekend nights or microwaving mac and cheese when I don’t want to trek to Commons in the snow, I try to avoid even walking through the residence hall kitchens. After all, with classes, work, clubs, and other things to worry about, how does one find the time to cook a meal or buy groceries at the store? But, in an attempt to learn “how to adult,” I decided to take my unused pots and pans, put my cooking skills to the test and make a meal.

Ordering the meal

Hello Fresh is a subscription service that delivers meal kits: a box of pre-portioned ingredients and a set of instructions for customers to follow. Marketed as “easy home cooking” on their website, Hello Fresh is meant to make the cooking process simple (with their one-sheet set of instructions) and quick (with most recipes being listed as 30 minutes to an hour). They are one of the many meal kit services on the rise, especially as this style of “easy” cooking is becoming increasingly popular.

The process of ordering is pretty simple. Hello Fresh posts a set of available recipes to choose from on their website, which differ depending on the week, and you pick which ones you would like sent to your door, as well as when. There are 27 recipes to choose from every week, categorized into a Classic, Family, or Veggie plan but Hello Fresh has a total archive of over 2500 meals.

In terms of cost, the lowest packages can be around $60 (with three dishes serving two people each) to $100 (with three dishes serving three people each), which isn’t a too expensive deal if you’re trying to share with friends. As a plus, college students can also get 15% off every box. I actually got my first meal kit for free, courtesy of my older sister who was able to offer six free meal kits to her friends after using the service herself for a few weeks. Having graduated from college two years ago, she likes using the service as a way to catch up with her old friends while learning how to cook.

Cooking the meal

My two friends and I cooked a “‘Little Ears’ Pasta” dish. It was cool to see how many different ingredients they had to offer wrapped in small packages like pasta, sausage, pesto, chili flakes, cheese, and broccoli. The only ingredients they asked for but didn’t include in the kit were olive oil, salt, and pepper, but I was able to grab those easily from a few friends. The ingredients were all usable but not extremely fresh, having arrived at the Mail Center earlier in the day inside an insulated cooler with ice packs inside.

It was easy to follow the steps and all the instructions were straightforward. Nothing was too complicated to follow and it was helpful to have visuals. Rather than taking the listed 25 minutes, however, it took around a little under an hour to cook. Part of this may have been because of the small space inside the kitchen and our limited utensils (since we had one small pot and one pan) but even then the process seemed to be lengthier than the instructions mentioned.

I had actually also ordered the “Honey-Glazed Pork Tenderloin” dish that included roasted sweet potatoes and green beans but was too lazy to cook any more after the first dish. The amount of food we cooked based on our first recipe, however, was definitely enough to feed two individuals but no more than that. The food itself was actually not bad, with the seasoning making it more than just a dish of pasta and sausage. It was better than the dining hall food, in my opinion, and I found myself wanting to eat more even after I finished.

Overall opinions

The biggest drawback from using a meal kit service like Hello Fresh had to be the fact that actually cooking took more time than I expected and wanted to use. However, Hello Fresh does save time in other ways — like the time needed to find a recipe online, go to a grocery store, and pray that the cooking process all works out.

Additionally, with Hello Fresh, I didn’t have to worry about buying too little or too much of an ingredient because it was all sent straight to campus and packaged in one box. I could easily follow the steps and cook a pretty good-tasting meal.

Would I buy it again?

Not often, and not unless I was in my own kitchen. I think that if I had more time in my schedule to cook, had more money to casually spend, and had a bigger kitchen space with more easily accessible pots and pans, I would love to routinely use Hello Fresh, as opposed to just eating dining hall food. But, like most of us on this campus, I just don’t have the schedule where I can do that. In general, though, cooking was a fun learning experience and I would advise everyone to take the time at some point to make a meal on their own — whether it’s with Hello Fresh or not.