The first Gousto box spent its afternoon on Jean's hall floor, next to her umbrella stand, with two ice packs doing their best. Rob fetched it at ten past two on Monday 8 September, which kept his running joke about Jean's parcel service going for another week. By the time I got home from the office at ten past three, he had unpacked it into the fridge: three recipe cards, a pile of tiny paper bags and a net of potatoes that looked far too clean.
In the spring I'd done four HelloFresh boxes and been honest about them. This time I wanted a meal kit to do one particular job, not to be an experiment. The job was Mondays and Tuesdays, my office days. I'm home by ten past three, but Monday is also the big wash day and Tuesday is Brownies at 6:15, so tea has to be on the table by 5:30 and cleared by 5:55. The cooking isn't the problem on those days. The deciding is. By the time I've driven back from Kirkstall, my brain has used up every "what shall we have" on invoices.
Three boxes, nine teas
Each box was three recipes for four people, so twelve portions. Monday and Tuesday took two of the recipes, and the third went on Thursday, when I work from home and Rob does pick-up. The first box was £21.99, the second £41.34 and the third £55.49, because the introductory discount tapers off like a bad tan.
From memory, the nine teas were sausage and mash with onion gravy, chicken fajita bowls, baked cod with a crumb topping and sweet potato wedges, pork meatballs with spaghetti, a chicken and leek pasta bake, a veggie chilli with rice, turkey burgers with wedges, a mild chicken korma and a sausage and veg traybake. Gousto does give you more to pick from than the other box did, and I liked scrolling through them on Saturday morning with a cup of tea.
Did it fit a 5:30 tea?
Mostly, but the recipe cards were optimistic. Where a card said 25 to 35 minutes, my galley kitchen, which is one person wide and has four rings with one always taken by the kettle, took 40. The pasta bake needed 20 minutes in the oven on top of the prep, and on Tuesday 16 September it came out at 5:41. Isla ate hers standing up in her Brownie uniform while Rob held her coat.
The boxes were on my side in other ways. Nothing was left over, nothing went off, and for the first time I didn't open the fridge on a Monday and stare at a yoghurt and a half-lemon. The cards sat on the side with the ingredients lined up behind them, and I could cook while Alfie told me about his day. I really did like that.
What the kids ate
Isla ate nearly all of it, including the chilli, which she called "a bit weird but fine". Alfie ate the main thing on five of the nine teas. He liked the sausage and mash (no gravy, because gravy has bits), the burgers and the traybake, and he ate the chicken and rice out of the fajita bowls and ignored everything green. The meatballs went in his mouth one by one and the sauce stayed on the plate. The cod, the pasta bake, the chilli and the korma were all rejected with variations of the same face.
The portions were the other thing. They're smaller than the HelloFresh ones, and fine for the children, but the adult share is a polite helping. On the nights of the sausage and mash and the burgers, Rob had cheese on toast at eight, and I counted it three times and said nothing.
The money, and why I cancelled
The three boxes came to £118.82 for 36 portions, which is £3.30 each on average. At full price it would have been £4.62 a portion, so the first box and its discount did most of the heavy lifting. My own cooking is about £1.65 a portion, so the boxes cost double. The same nine teas from the Aldi shop would have been about £59.40, which means the experiment cost me £59.42 more than usual. I counted the boxes in the grocery budget the weeks they came, and September ended at £452, so we survived it.
I cancelled on Thursday 25 September. The confirmation said no box would arrive on the 29th, and I felt a small rush of relief rather than regret, which tells me something. I'd order a box again in a mad week, for example one with a school trip and a work deadline on top of each other. I won't do it as a habit, because the maths won't allow it. It was a good way to spend three Mondays and I'd like it noted that I did not buy a fourth.
The sums: £118.82 for 36 portions, £3.30 each, against about £1.65 at home, so £59.42 more than the same nine teas would have cost me.
