Weekly Recipe Delivery

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No matter how much you love eating and cooking, it takes a fair amount of thought, planning and shopping to start whipping up an exciting meal. From checking the fridge and cupboards, to writing a list, doing the shop and then carrying it home – that’s all before you’ve even sliced an onion or flicked on the oven.

Recipe boxes are the answer to all of this, when you don’t have time to go to the shop but you want a proper home-cooked meal.

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Easing much more of the burden than an online food shop ever could, these clever kits come with all the ingredients in the exact amount you need – meaning there’s very little, if any, food waste – along with very easy-to-follow recipe cards you can keep and reuse. There’s not really much more you can ask for, bar someone else cooking it for you.

You can choose from a huge range of recipes, and most brands cover a range of diets and cuisines, so whether you fancy Mexican or Indian, or want something vegan or just meat-free, you can get it.

Some companies only use organic food, and some use produce from family-run farms, but all are inspiring and will get you cooking great meals at home with ease.

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We’ve tested some of these boxes over years, and some we go back to time and time again, with some of the recipes becoming stalwarts in our repertoire. We’ve cooked and eaten meals from every box, looking for how easy the recipes were to follow, eco-credentials such as packaging, the range of recipes on offer and the delivery.

Everything we tested was to feed two people, but where there’s an option for boxes to feed more, we’ve specified. These are the ones sure to make your stomach rumble.

Founded in 2012, Gousto is perhaps the most well known of all the recipe boxes around. And in our minds, it’s the best too. To us, it has the widest variety of enticing meals – ranging across Thai, Mexican, Indian, BBQ, Moroccan and Italian to name just a few, with plenty of vegan and veggie meals too – which often makes it hard for us to choose just a few.

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We find Gousto’s recipes are also the most reliable to make, and importantly, remake again. We’ve had numerous boxes over the years and there’s always solid recipes in there that we come back to time and time again. And most importantly the recipes are always as good as the first time, and plenty have now earned places in our weekly recipe repertoire, such as a cauliflower and spinach dal recipe, and spicy beans with homemade tortilla chips. The ingredients are good quality and the meal always turns out looking like the recipe card.

We go for the regular box, and you can choose two, three or four recipes per box. The portions are generous, and there’s often some left over, which means lunch for tomorrow is sorted. The cards are a little bigger than A5, and the recipes on the back include pictures too, so even beginners won’t be put off by the steps. It’s without doubt the box we’d recommend to everyone, no matter their cooking skill, or diet.

Gousto is also a B Corp company, meaning it has attained extremely high standards when it comes to sustainability. It’s also free to cancel any time.

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As another of the forerunners in the recipe box revolution, Abel & Cole offers up brilliantly inspiring dishes, where everything is deliciously organic.

As helping people to reduce their carbon footprints is such a key part of Abel & Cole’s philosophy, last year it added its meat-free meal kits to its ever-growing repertoire. Within this, there’s a weekly menu of 12 dishes to choose from, and it shows the amount of carbon saved – Abel & Cole found that these recipes used, on average, 63 per cent less carbon than if they included fish or meat, such as swapping out the lamb in a classic shepherd’s pie.

Recipes are all created by the very talented in-house team, and include dishes like spag bol with lemon gremolata or baked potato with coronation chickpeas, as no one is ever too good for a good ol’ jacket. Every week, there’s six recipes for four people, and six for two people. Across the rest of the recipe boxes, there’s eight categories to choose from, which are: veggie, vegan, foodie, quick (meaning a mximum cooking time of 30 minutes), light, serves two, serves four and everything.

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We’ve always found Abel & Cole’s recipes to be very well created, easy to follow and super tasty with plenty of zing, if at times a little more fiddly – and time-consuming – than expected, but perhaps that’s more of a comment on our cooking skills than anything else.

Solely vegan, Grubby is the UK’s first totally vegan recipe delivery box. It’s also the only one we’ve come across that offers up tunes to play while you’re cooking too in the form of a Spotify playlist. If that’s not bang for your buck, we don’t know what is. It also champions locally sourced organically grown British produce, where most of it is grown in Kent, Essex and Bedfordshire from family-run farms. The food is organic too.

Grubby was set up by Martin in 2019, after working in office catering for many years, he wanted to find something quick and easy for people to create for dinner when they got home from work. The packaging is 100 per cent recyclable, and if you live in London, your delivery will be made by bike, and waste is offset through food waste partners.

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There’s more than 60 recipes to choose from. We had two, and loved the harissa spiced courgette with couscous and garlic tahini dressing, which is full of texture and flavour, as well as the sweet tang from the chopped apricots and added crunch in the form of the flaked almonds.

The USP here at Mindful Chef is offering up healthy meals, but that’s not to say the others aren’t healthy too. Don’t worry though, there’s no diet fads or calorie counting here, phew. Instead, it’s more about nutrition. All of this information is listed on the site when you’re picking your recipes. So if that sort of information isn’t for you, it’s worth keeping that in mind too. There’s no refined carbs, such as white rice, and all recipes are gluten and dairy free too.

A quick look on the website and you’ll see that all the recipes are bright, bold and pretty enticing. And good news if you’re veggie, Mindful Chef recipes are often made with you in mind, as one thing you’ll notice is a lot of recipes feature tofu or tempeh. Although we love meat-free meals, we usually prefer using vegetables creatively or pulses such as lentils instead of tofu or tempeh, which is just a personal preference.

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We do love that some recipes are as speedy as 10 or 15 minutes, which we know is a saviour for time-rushed people. Mindful Chef also goes that little bit further, as since 2017, it has partnered with One Feeds Two, a charity that donates a school meal to a child living in poverty for every meal purchased. It’s also a carbon neutral company.

Another recipe box company that’s practically a household name is Hello Fresh, and came to life in 2011. What’s different here is that it is really paving the way for using local producers, from the well-known Tomato Stall from the Isle of Wight you’d likely already come across, to meat seller Kepak in Ireland which only works with family farms that produce exceptional quality meat. Its supply chain cuts out the middle sections and HelloFresh is carbon neutral too.

We liked the variety of recipes here, plenty of them take 20 minutes, part of its rapid range, and we found that to be accurate too. We also like that recipes include spice levels too, so we can work around guests if they’re not such spice fans. Weekly recipe choices cover everything from Middle Eastern chicken to tacos, Thai noodles and more. We really liked the harissa spiced beef pilaf dish which was speedy and packed a flavoursome punch.

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Inspired by cuisines around the world, Cookaway does things slightly differently. Its offering is split into seven cuisines: Japanese, Italian Malaysian, Indian, Spanish, Pakistani and the newest, which is Greek, where all the menus have been designed by experts in their fields, such as food writer and MasterChef 2014 winner, Ping Coombes who created the Malaysian dishes.

We tried the Indian Cookaway box, created by Nidhi Verma, who is also the brand’s founder. The box contained the Punjabi keema matar with fragrant basmati rice. We’d never cooked rice in a wide-bottomed pan like that before and found it to be faultless. We’ve since cooked the dish again and really loved it.

Cookaway also does live cookalongs with the chefs too which you

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