Be Excellent To Each Other

Basically, we are doing Hello Fresh this week and the convenience of not having to plan meals and think too much about cooking was very appealing. But it's a touch too expensive for what it is and the excessive plastic packaging is environmentally obnoxious (tiny plastic punnets and sachets of spices and the like).

So, it got me to thinking there must be a cheaper way of replicating the experience. A shopping list tool you can add recipes to and use to auto populate  your shopping basket at a super market.

I've now discovered there are plenty of shopping list tools you can add recipes to, but nothing so far that auto populates your shopping basket.

Tesco claims to have a meal planner feature that adds ingredients to your shopping basket, but it doesn't seem to work.

The closest I've found is ocado, and adding your recipes as individual shopping lists, which you can then add to your basket. This, however, doesn't address the issue of duplication of crossover  ingredients between recipes. It's also ocado, so costs a bit more.

So, anyone had similar thoughts and more success than this?

Mimi was telling me that Morrissons are apparently getting into this game where they send you only the ingredients you need for the recipes you pick so no waste left after everything is cooked. Might be worth having a look at that??

Nice, thank you. That looks like it's circling around the right area, but is missing the ability to add and save one's own recipes (sorry I realise I didn't mention that.)

Will raise Morrisons with Mrs Fop!

This surprises me, greatly.

Reverse engineer it. Simply make dishes from the first 4 or 5 randomly selected ingredients you find.

We use Gousto. It's cheaper and far more choice. Some minor issues over the last six months or so we've used them but overall very happy as before we were wasting a lot of food.

Gousto may be cheaper than Hello Fresh, but it's still horrifically expensive compared to even an online shop.

Having had a quick look at the recipes on the site, I think agree. It seems to run around £4-5 per portion. I think most of my typical weeknight staples are around that from Ocado, and I make no efforts at all to be thrifty with food shopping. And most of the stuff that's so carefully portioned out has so much shelf life that it doesn't matter anyway because you could just buy a whole packet/jar/whatever. For example, I saw rice, cooking oils, sesame seeds, honey, stock cubes, various spices.

But then I make a full weekly meal plan (sneak peek below) so I'm a long way outside Gousto's target market.

I might steal a few Gousto recipe ideas, though.

Absolutely it's cheaper if you plan ahead and make your own meals from scratch and enjoy cooking etc. But we don't. And we were throwing a lot away. So £4 per portion is reasonable to us considering how much we were spending on takeout.

Well, hang on, though. Having looked at the Gousto site, you _are_ making those meals from scratch, or very nearly so. You're not saving much labour there compared to what I do.

In fact, looking more closely, you may be doing rather more work. Even some of the "easy" recipes are what I would regard as fairly ambitious for a midweek dinner, like shepherd's pie from scratch, say. Or breading fish before pan-frying it. Or making a tomato sauce to bake gnocchi in. I'd only be committing to that amount of work 1-2 times in any given week, maybe less if I know I've got a lot on.

Agreed, but there's no thought involved in it. Get the ingredients out of the fridge/cupboard, cook them, nothing wasted. It really does work for us.

And we always get a couple of "10 mins" ones.

The kits from Aldi are very good.

We cook from scratch, some of the week, also have premade frozen things (Chilli, Casserole etc) for quicker meals

Also, have some Cook Frozen meals for times we forget to take stuff out of the freezer or just can't be arsed to do much.

Didn't know there were sites like Gusto, tempted to give a try for a week just for a change (will depend on how easy it is to cancel)

Pricing must be somewhere close to ready meals @£4 or so, I had a brief dabble with this sort of food when the kitchen was getting done and remember it wasn't cheap.

If anyone does fancy using Gousto you can get 50% off your first 2 boxes using my link (will send if interested), and I get £15 credit towards boxes too.
It definitely works for us because I’m so rubbish at remembering to get things out of the freezer - which leads to takeaway or a “quick trip” to the shops where I spend £60 and have nothing to show for it.
The app is really good with Gousto, you can control frequency, delivery date, whether it’s for 2 or 4 people and whether you want 2, 3, or 4 meals (the more you get the cheaper per portion), and pick the recipes. You can order one off boxes or schedule breaks in deliveries too.
In term of comments about the amount of packaging - mostly it is reusable or recyclable and they’ve just sent an email pledging to reduce the plastic packaging. But definitely isn’t quite at the level of Abel&Cole - they pick up all the packaging when they deliver your next box and reuse it all, they’re also mostly organic, but you can’t choose the recipes and it is more expensive (though I’ve not used it since I lived with my Mum, so could have changed)

I enjoyed Gousto. I ended up ditching it because it seemed a luxury, and I was being tight, but I enjoyed having a simplycook membership - they just post you sauces and recipes and you buy the rest yourself. Probably to any competent chef that makes it all the more pointless, but it worked for me.

We did Hello Fresh for a little while - it was good, for a bit, but really only a short term thing. Some of the dishes were great, so we kept the recipe cards even after discontinuing the service. After a while though we got a bit fed up with the seeming large number of recipes that were heavy on the lemon or garlic, both of which I like a lot but after a while it became too much. Plus the pricing and the packaging sat quite uncomfortably with us.

Recently, Lady T has been doing a lot of bulk cooking which is saving us a lot of time and cash. She's got some really good recipes, and has been using some neat ways of mixing it up a little to avoid boredom, like a mushroom ragu, great with rice or pasta, easily becomes the filling for a lasagna or the topping for a jacket potato. A lentil bolognese could be used similarly.

We've also been cutting down our meat consumption lately which is quite good to the wallet, and it makes the times we do have meat feel like a nice treat. Roast beef leftovers became included in a stir fry and bulked out with a load of veg. Delicious.

This is basically what I do and I feed the 4 of us all week for about £60 (at Tesco prices); this doesn't include Gaz's lunches Mon-Fri though. He generally buys rolls and meat for himself at the beginning of the week and keeps them at work.

Hello Fresh etc seem ridiculously expensive for what you get (to me). I eat 5-6 meals a day so I need to be tight AF otherwise it'd cost me a fortune.

That is so us! Have 2 freezers in the garage and a decent one as part of the big US style fridge. My wife has a small bit of OCD about defrosting things so won't get say 3 days worth of food out at once, I tend to so this at weekends.

Some weeks I'm a at the supermarket every day on the way home, just small things like nappies, cat food or some salad or fruit, we get a Tesco delivery once a bloody week as well!

No, she doesn't.

Back to the OP, realfood.tesco.com works for me.

However, annoyingly, it’s powered by whisk.com which has a far bigger database of recipes, but those recipes at whisk itself don’t have online retail shopping list integration.

What do you mean? Or are you being ironic and I'm missing the point?

I assume he meant "what you probably mean is that your wife is a bit pernickety about things, which is nothing at all like OCD which can be incredibly debilitating even in its mildest forms and equating it with being fussy often means OCD sufferers feel like nobody takes their problems seriously."

I'm sure he means that OCD is a difficult and debilitating condition and your wife liking things in some semblance of order doesn't mean she has it.

Unless she's been diagnosed with a bit of OCD in which case I apologise on Grim…'s behalf. But only a bit.

Yup.

It really gets to me when people compare fussiness with OCD.

You could say I'm a little (Bang)

So my wife is fussy then? We can add some sort of medical qualification to your many talents.

Even more remarkable when you know fuck all about my wife.

Sounds like she's pretty fussy about defrosting things. You said it yourself.

I don't think fussiness is a medical condition so I don't think we can add medical qualifications based on that. However we can pretty safely add "reading" and basic understanding. Wife based knowledge can be limited specifically to what you've told us.

If your wife has OCD then I will apologize whole-heartedly.

She doesn't though, you cunt.

A few things:
1) things appear to be getting pretty heated about what was a pretty innocuous, throwaway comment by asfish.
2) why has nobody suggested she's a bit anal, yet?

I understand but I think you're pissing in the wind with that, it's becoming just another figure of speech like "I'm starving", "I'm a bit depressed", "he's a psycho" etc.

Gotta keep trying.

Good man.

I believe you have the direction of travel wrong. 40 years ago, racist slurs where "just another figure of speech." 20 years ago, so were homophobic slurs. I think there's growing awareness that common terms that make light of mental health issues both trivialise and erase real suffers, and we'd all be better off if that stopped. I think, or I hope, that Grim... is on the right side of history here.

Maybe you're right but I think the thing about OCD is that although it has entered the public consciousness, which has benefits in so far as people might be more able to understand someone's behaviour, it has been presented largely with a degree of levity. As a somewhat amusing quirk of personality rather than something which causes terrible suffering.

It’s all degrees though, isn’t it. Asfish’s missus has only got it a little bit but for others it can debilitating.

That’d be the O... *bang*

I already made that joke!

Well no, that's the point. Some who is "a bit OCD about cleaning" probably just likes a tidy house, whereas someone who actually has OCD is going to find themselves cleaning an already clean surface again and again, and potentially suffering from anxiety if they can't (or even if they can) do so.

I can't help pissing in the wind but it's fine for you all to use the phrase so thoughtlessly.

My face, so chapped.

'Enola Gay' is their best track.

This. We walked down the aisle to it at our wedding.

The "OC" part of the name means that it's not really possible to have "a little bit of it", obsession and compulsion doesn't really work that way.

That’d be the OC... *nuke goes off*

This thread has given me this earworm.

Er, no to both of you. Assuming she’s been diagnosed as having OCD then she might have it to a minor degree, worse or much worse. Not everyone with the condition has it manifest as some compulsive cleaner; the symptoms can be quite nuanced and have a variety of effects on the sufferer who can cope with the condition in different ways. If she hasn’t had the diagnosis then, yeah, what you lot said, but you can absolutely have OCD to a minor degree and not have to be a serial cleaner. I met someone who just had reoccurring thoughts and didn’t want to clean the sodding kitchen until his knuckles bleed. It probably wouldn’t get a diagnosis for just leaving some food out but that doesn’t seem to be what’s been suggested by asfish- why would he get so mad about it?

I think you may be overthinking this and that grim actually just thought he was a cunt.

Nah. Forever Live And Die and Talking Loud And Clear are better, IMO.

EG is amazing, though !