Review 2016: Gousto Recipe Delivery

This isn’t a paid review (none of the reviews on NHM are!). I spent the money on this service knowing that I would be feeding my family and sharing my views on the service with you.

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and take the hit for your blog :-D.

Review 2016: Gousto Recipe Delivery

Gousto Recipe Delivery

I keep seeing details about lots of Recipe Delivery companies and have been meaning to try a few of them out for a couple of years.

Mr NHM is quite fussy with his food so it’s always a challenge to find something healthy that he will eat. Miss NHM has also started being quite fussy, so I’ve been finding it quite frustrating finding something that we will all eat.

I finally got around to getting things sorted over the Easter holidays. We all had a week off work and school and had loads of fun activities planned.

Gousto worked out really well, because it meant I didn’t have to think about what meals we were eating in the evening, so I could really enjoy our time off and days out.

I’d been keeping an eye out for leaflets with discount codes that you can cash in on your first and second shop.

Starting the Service

I logged onto the website and signed up using the gift code that I had. You can choose which day you want your meals delivered to you. We chose ours to be delivered on a Wednesday, so that I didn’t have to worry too much about our meals towards the end of the week.

There are 12 recipes that you can choose from for each box, so I had a look through and it was a tough choice what to pick! I chose three meals for four people. The website also shows you which are the quickest recipes to cook, which has the lowest calories and which is the most popular.

You can choose to have portions for two or four people and can also choose to have a vegetarian box. The website shows you the price for each portion as it’s cheaper if you choose a box for four people.

You can also choose to have your boxes weekly, fortnightly or monthly and you can choose to have either two meals, three meals or four meals in each box. It is cheaper the more meals and the more portions that you have in your box.

On our delivery day a lovely big box arrived on our doorstep! It was SOOO exciting! Just like Christmas :-D.

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I took everything out of the box. I cannot tell you how excited I was. I clearly need to get out more! lol.

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All of the meat and chilled products were packaged very carefully in an ice bag:

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Ice bag for the meat and fish
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Reusable Ice Packs
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Herbs, stock and extras

I loved that the condiments came in their own little pots:

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The Meals

The first thing I cooked was Tamarind-Glazed cod & coconut noodles. It sounds really fancy but it was actually pretty straightforward. However, it took me a while to work out that all of the ingredients had to be doubled because I was cooking for 4 and the recipe cards are written for two! 271

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The finished product even looked like the pictures on the instruction card! 😀

I wanted to include a fish dish as we don’t eat enough fish in our house and I was a bit concerned that this wouldn’t go down very well. But everyone loved it so that was a huge relief. It’s quite a sweet dish, despite not having any sugar in, which I wasn’t expecting.

The Second Meal I cooked was Herby Cumberland Sausage Cassoulet.

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This was hugely popular and really easy to make.

I realised at this point that at the bottom of the recipe card, it includes how long it will take to cook each meal, how many of your 5 a day are included and the calorie, fat and protein per person of each portion. I thought that was pretty cool.

The third meal I cooked was Barbecue Pork Steaks with mixed salad.

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The sauce for the pork chops was really yummy and I was really impressed that this also looked like the pictures of the cooked meal on the recipe cards.

I was actually surprised at how much of a hit each of these meals were, despite Mr NHM telling me off for including salad with his pork and for putting in the corriander in the cod soup!

Everyone ate everything and they both commented on how similar the finished products were to the recipe card pictures.

Tips

You get to keep the recipe cards so you can recreate the meals again. I’ve already cooked the sausage cassoulet again with vegetarian sausages and it was a huge hit again.

You get to keep all of the packaging so Miss NHM used the box (as it suggested!) to make a house and we kept the ice packaging for use in our ice box.

It’s quite easy to stop and start the service. You just change the options on the website at any time you like.

Final Thoughts

If I was made of money I would ALWAYS use Gousto. It was a fantastic service and I loved that it was all organic and I didn’t have to think about any preparation as all ingredients come in the box and the recipe cards tell you exactly what to do.

It was a huge weight off my mind, especially during the holiday, not having to worry about our meals for a couple of days and I found the recipes really easy to cook.

I’m definitely going to see if my budget stretches to me using the service when I know we have a frantically busy week and my mind will be on other things that won’t include what is for dinner that evening. I also plan to use the service during the next school holidays that we have off but are staying at home as it was such a luxury not having to worry about meal planning or preparation.

If you would like to try out the Gousto recipe delivery and receive a £25 discount, you can enter code “LOUIS118348” in the promotion box at checkout.

If you do use this service, let me know what you think!

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