Goodfood meal kit review - 3 vegetarian dishes

We have been in a bit of food funk. I found a few recipe that can be whipped up easily and just kept making them because they are easy for an after work meal. Well my taste buds were not having it any more, they protested and reminisced all the good old days of differing flavors and spices. With some luck, we scored some Goodfood coupons and decided to give the meal kit service a go. With an $80 off coupon, vegetarian options, what do we have to lose? Not a sponsored review. My intent is also not to share any recipes here (Goodfood's trademarked probably). But if you thinking of trying out Goodfood, maybe this is will be useful. Here we go..

1) Good packaging, but A LOT of it: 

A big heavy box full of food arrived at our door on the initial agreed upon date. the box looks insulated and came with 2 massive ice packs that can be re-frozen and re-used. We got 3 different recipes and all the necessary grocery that came with it. It's really a substantial amount of things in that box. we barely had enough room in the fridge. Many little thing had its plastic wrap, eg. a little bit of spice. many things didn't come with additional plastic, eg. ginger and garlic. I mean the company tried but it was still quite a lot of plastic for individual packaging. Each meal was packed in one single large plastic, so you keep your ingredients together so no mix-ups. good thought!

2) Need basic cooking/kitchen skill:

the recipe steps assumed the user can perform some basic kitchen tasks. But not all of those are easy, though you think you can cook. I had trouble use peeler to ribbon carrots for example. You also need to know how to dice, mince, peel, grate, zest, juice things. Since most of the veggies came in its whole entity, you gotta prep it all. The prep and cut will take time, can run from 10-30 min easily. 

3) Portions are decent:

We had a chose of making 2 or 4 portions. Always made the bigger portion. Given how much work each recipe was, doing it once was enough and have the leftovers for the next meal. With one exception the salad was simply enormous, the portions are generally good. 

4) Cooking time is a big "estimate"

Don't like the "cooking time: 25 min" fool you. Like mentioned, prep took 10-30 min, and then you perhaps add the cooking time described. I found for any of the 3 recipes, it often took 45 min of 2 people doing the work (which allowed certain stuff to occur by tangent, but also added more chefs in the kitchen). The point is, don't bank on only spending 25 min. 

We tried 3 different recipes. I'll tell you just a bit of each.  

1) White vegetarian chili

Really good. Loved the lemony flavor. Definitely learned a bit more about flavor profiles and will put lime in my own dishes.

2) String pea and lemon pesto tagliatelle

Very similar to the regular pesto pasta I make with fusilli. I wished for more pesto. one of our pesto containers actually broken and leaked all over the food. I just added more from my fridge. I wished for more string beans, and ended up adding more from my regular grocery batch. Salad was massive, 2 giant heads of lettuce was a bit excessive.

The pasta was pretty fresh and amazing. Loved the fresh tagliatelle.

3) Zucchini butternut squash curry

Squash was so good like this. I never knew what to do with butternut squash but this was an un-likely combo and was creamy and had some of the zucchini crunch. Served with lime again and lentil rice. I'll do this again. 

Summary: good to try once and get some inspirations in color, flavor, ingredient combo. I discovered some really awesome tips via this journey and enjoyed these recipes thoroughly. I would not however keep subscribing unfortunately. I liked getting my own groceries and making modifications. The plastic packaging was also a bit too much. Worth trying it once, see for yourself.