Some thoughts on food from a box

A part of my recent “not having much money” lifestyle has included rotating through all of the various meal delivery boxes. None of them are very good, but most offer some sort of intro deal where the first one costs between 20 and 37$ which is basically less than the cost of groceries, assuming at least one of the meals has fish or meat in it.(Sometimes with this scheme I get to eat fish twice in one week…. luxury.)

I’m not saying this as a recommendation for any of these things. I wouldn’t, generally speaking, recommend any of them (with the exception of Sunbasket, but maybe because the food that you can make from that is actually pretty good and you don’t feel like a picky child when you eat it, they do not have a deal that is worth trying. Their food was totally fine, some of it even pretty good.)

I just got a card in the mail for one of these things called gobble. Never heard of it. They’re all basically the same though: requisite meal that is just chicken breast a small amount of vegetables and potatoes, something with “crusted salmon,” two (always two!!!) options involving ravioli or tortelloni (what is it, why is it different from tortellini and how did these box companies get so much of it?). Probably a weird soup, something in lettuce cups.

Eating these makes me feel a little depressed, but I’ve found in the last month or so some useful things that you can do to make your box food seem like something a real adult could eat (should you choose to do so.)

Okay first: don’t do hello fresh. No matter how hard you try you cannot make your hello fresh dinner feel like real food. They also love to promise you a gift, but then the “gift” is like, two string cheese that you think are regular string cheese but are actually smoked and so are inedible. I don’t think anyone was crying out for smoked string cheese, I know I wasn’t. I tried to eat a string cheese warm out of my bag after going to the gym on friday. It’s not usually a good food, but warm string cheese is a true abomination. It gets slimy and very flacid. Really tough going. I don’t think smoke flavor would have made it better.

If you must try one of these, because the deal is too enticing, here are my tips:

If you have a sauce, maybe a “creamy” sauce that is a weak bechamel with a big chunk of cream cheese tossed in—sadly more common than you might think—here is one option. Put butter in the pan, grind in a lot of pepper, toast the pepper in the butter, when it smells fragrant add the flour, cook that as well, it should be again a little toasty. Ignore the timing on the card, the timing will yield a bechamel that functions but has no flavor at all. Then add your liquids, whatever they are. If it calls for water here, use milk. Add more flavor somehow: I will add in several spoons of prepared pesto as well as some chili flakes (the burlap and barrel urfa chili is good here, gochugaru is good as well.) The pesto makes a big difference. Add a bit of lemon zest at the end. You have to do this, because otherwise you’re just dumping wet cream cheese on your pasta. Save yourself. Cream cheese shouldn’t be wet.

For the love of god, don’t use their pre-shredded parmersean. You probably have a dried out chunk in your refrigerator, just grate that up instead. It will be incomparably better.

They never give you anywhere near enough vegetables, unless the vegetable in question is carrots. If something says that it is with peas, just add another cup of the frozen peas you probably have rattling around in the back of your freezer. If it’s a soup or stew, maybe the mixed carrots and peas that you bought when you thought your dog was dying and now have to use up somehow. It’s not “good” per-se but at least now it has a vegetable, which makes it feel like real food.

Cook everything (everything) for at least a minute, but maybe four, less than the recipe says. You don’t need to blast your vegetables. You don’t need to dehydrate your fish. You certainly don’t need to turn your pasta into goo. (This only (maybe) doesn’t apply to chicken. Please don’t eat raw chicken.)

Most of the time I find the ratio of meat to other things to be unhinged. I like to use the meat more sparingly. If something has salad greens I might get a radicchio or just some more romaine and use the same amount of chicken for an extra day (or two.) Similarly, they give you a weird amount of rice. I use my rice cooker to make rice, and also I love rice. I eat it almost every day. I will usually use my own rice and then accumulate little bags of theirs until it is enough to use. For couscous, I add more from what I have in my cupboard. What can I say, I like a carbohydrate. If you add a bit more of the vegetable and the carb you can have lunch for at least an extra day and sometimes two at relatively little cost.

The real problem with hello fresh, but also what allows for their alarmingly fast dinners, is their strange pre-packaged sauces. All of these things have weird pre-packed sauce, but Hello Fresh’s are undoubtedly the worst. They are all overwhelmingly sweet, and also salty. I truly don’t know if they can be saved. Either you use them (I usually do, and then feel sort of bad about my life and choices) or you don’t. But if you don’t use them you aren’t really engaging with the product, so what was even the point of buying it?

I mentioned this to a friend of mine who said to me that she didn’t understand the point of these boxes “why not just cook?”

Which, listen, I get that. If you’re trying these you’ve already accepted that you need to hand some of your life responsibilities for this week over to a large company, but also you don’t want to order take out. This is understandable. You’ve done nothing wrong by accepting the box food into your life. I don’t like the box food. I resent it. It makes me feel like a child. It makes me feel like a podcast host (no offense to podcast hosts) from 2016. I feel as though I am expected to read an ad about how “box food taught me how to cook.”

That’s not how I feel. But recently I have felt so overwhelmed with the number of responsibilities I have (despite not having a job!) that there are times when I want to let someone else, anyone else, make all the choices for me. That’s not, however, a way that I can live my life, even if I wish that I could, just for a week or two. Instead, when I get the little card in the mail offering a first week for 25$ I say “okay.”

I accept the guiding hand of the corporation that sends me the ingredients to make boring mediocre food. I do a few small things to make it slightly less bland. I resent the company, the food systems that exist, the welfare state that denied me food stamps, the fact that I am getting chicken delivered by lasership. But I do it anyway, because sometimes I have to yield my own decision making to the power of the recipe creators at some corporation. Sometimes making six less decisions in a week is the nicest thing that I can do to myself, and I have to make compromises.