My dining habits have, if not improved then at least diversified of late. In return for more of my personal details than I'm really comfortable with Hello Fresh has agreed to deliver a box of meals to my door each week. I can't help thinking if you wanted to run an identity theft racket or pursue a career in assassination then starting a company like Hello Fresh might be a good start. It is amazing how much information people will hand over in return for some mild convenience. And the convenience is mild, Hello Fresh doesn't cook the meals for you or wash up after you (although maybe I should subscribe to the platinum service). It simply dumps the components of a meal on your doorstep along with a recipe and leaves it up to you. It's basically meal delivery done by Ikea. I keep expecting to see an allen key in the box along with the ingredients.
More irritatingly they make some broad assumptions such as "our customers are relatively functional human beings" and therefore the recipes tend to include instructions like "from your pantry take olive oil and balsamic vinegar." I'm sorry, from my what I take what and what? The first thing I had to do once I got my inaugural Hello Fresh box was go shopping to acquire all of the things that they rather optimistically assumed I would have as a matter of course. Then they tend to oversupply other things. A lot of the recipes include garlic, at least a lot of the ones I order do because I like garlic. Therefore each week among all of the other ingredients there will be a whole garlic. However since few recipes require more than a clove or two what it means is that after several months I have about half a tonne of semi mutilated garlic hanging around the place. On the plus side its been ages since I've been attacked by a vampire.
Another annoying point is the short lifespan of the ingredients they provide. A box is provided once a week and I strongly recommend that you cook the meals within that time. Things go off with amazing celerity. This was a shock to me. I am used to treating my refrigerator like a cryogenics storage facility. I toss something in there and if I pull it out six months later I expect it to be not just fresh but possibly capable of being restored to life. You would be amazed how often this works. Not with the Hello Fresh food however. If you don't eat it in that first week you're probably best to just clear out the fridge and create space for the next weeks arrivals.
I am sure that there will be some of you out there (hi Mum) who will be thinking "well of course you do that. Anything else would be horribly dangerous". All I can say is I have reached the age of fifty four and the only time I've had food poisoning was when I ate at a restaurant. The first few times I pulled out packets of putrid sludge that a relatively few weeks ago had been Hello Fresh supplied vegetables I assumed there must be something wrong with my fridge. As assumption that was disproved when I realised that the light cream had frozen solid. And don't get me started on the potatoes. Correct me if I'm wrong, actually don't correct me if I'm wrong, I hate that. I was under the impression that potatoes kept quite nicely if you just ignored them until it was time to eat. Now I am staring at a pair of globules that resemble nothing so much as alien testicles. I'm afraid that if I eat them something will burst out of my stomach and assault Sigourney Weaver. They are not just green, they glisten. The only time you normally see something this colour its seeping out of a toxic waste dump or on a Saudi prince's lamborghini. Look at me it shrieks. I have so much money I don't need good taste. Even a Saudi prince however would baulk at seeing that colour scheme on his potatoes.
I examined the potatoes for an unreasonably long period of time. I think I was waiting to see if they were only joking and if I watched long enough they would revert to a more normal potatoey colour. After fifteen minutes of so I reluctantly concluded that whatever the hell had happened to them was irreversible so I did the only sensible thing. I ordered KFC.
No comments:
Post a Comment