Freshly Prepared Meals Delivered to Your Door
Freshly Prepared Meals Delivered to Your Door
Let me just take a guess at how your supper routine goes. If it goes anything like mine then it is filled with mom making all the hard decisions and still pleasing no one. You are in charge of creating a menu that will please everyone but ends up pleasing no one. And you are tired of arguing over what to cook for supper because everyone’s answer is always “I don’t care” when really they do. Wouldn’t it be nice to just have prepared meals delivered to your door like magic that didn’t cost an arm and a leg?
If you are like me you are tired of cooking supper that no one wants to eat. Tired of being in charge of the planning, shopping, cooking, and cleaning up of supper. That one meal creates so much headache for our family! I recently came to a breaking point with cooking dinner. We have a small family of three and none of us like the same food and naturally since I am the one cooking I tend to make things that I like to eat. My husband and I don’t like anything the same and our 9-year-old daughter “isn’t hungry, she just wants a snack”. So that meal that I slaved away on, I am the only one eating it. The only thing we can agree on is eating out because we each get to pick our own meal.
Here is my frustration
Most of the time my husband will eat what I cook but that is of course if he is home. He always works late and will end up grabbing fast food on the way home because he is starving by the time he leaves the office at 8pm. But even if he eats what I cook it usually is only once. He does not like to eat leftovers.
So between everyone wanting different meals, half of the people actually eating it, and only one of us eating any leftovers, I was done. I was tired of searching through endless recipes trying to find healthy meals we all would eat. Tired of going to the grocery store and spending way too much on all of these ingredients I will only use for this one recipe. I was tired of spending an hour cooking one meal and dirtying the whole kitchen. Tired of no one eating it and lastly tired of spending another 30-45mins cleaning up the kitchen while everyone else went off to do whatever they wanted.
Can anyone else relate?? Or is it just me?
I think the worse of it all is I HATED throwing away all the leftovers no one would eat. It didn’t matter if I made chicken enchiladas with beans and rice (the one meal we can all agree on) we still couldn’t get all the food ate before it needed to be thrown away.
I know what you are thinking….freeze the leftovers. I have! I freeze the leftovers and warm them back up a month or so later and unless I break it down into a couple meals before freezing I will reheat it up just to again have leftovers.
Or my husband will ask… ”did this come out of the freezer?” Because he just assumes it’s going to taste bad. And even though it is much easier to reheat a frozen dinner then trying to make it all fresh again, it still ends up dirtying the kitchen up.
Okay, I know what you are thinking now…man can this lady complain about anything else?? I just feel like there has got to be a better way.
And I was right! There is a better way.
After some research and trial and error, I found a solution that works perfectly for us! And it almost seems too good to be true.
Meals Delivered
I have tried those delivery meals before and it didn’t work for us. It was the HelloFresh meals where they send you all the ingredients and directions to cook a delicious meal. I will say that each meal was delicious. I liked them all. My husband didn’t care for them as they were a bit too fancy for his taste.
The reason I didn’t care for them was that although they took away a lot of the headache of picking out a meal and buying the ingredients, I still had to spend 45mins to an hour cooking this meal that only I ate. Then I still had to clean up my whole kitchen every night.
I am not against cooking or cleaning. It just can become too much to do every single night.
Private Chief
I have often thought about how nice it must be to afford your own private chief like all the celebrities. I could get so much more done! So how much would you pay for a private chef? If you didn’t have to worry about looking up nutritious recipes that everyone agrees on, driving to the store and buying all the ingredients, spending every evening cooking meals, or cleaning up the kitchen while the rest of your family is off enjoying life, how much would you pay?
To me, that sounds amazing. If I could have someone else pick out the meals, someone else cooks the meals, and someone else cleans up after the meal, I would pay easily about $15-$20 a plate for that! Which I know is not enough to have my own private chief but that is easily what we pay to go out to eat.
By the time you get an appetizer, drinks, everyone gets their own plate, and a tip…yes easily that much!
Then what happens to the leftovers you bring home? You tell yourself you are going to eat them so you bring them home and they sit in the fridge until they are finally thrown away. And you just wasted easily an hour or two with driving to the restaurant, parking, waiting for your table, waiting for your food, waiting for your check, and driving back home.
Pros of eating out
Here are some pros of eating out and why this tends to be our go-to move for our family.
- Less stress, you get to enjoy your families company
- Convenient, no cooking, no cleaning
- Everyone gets to eat what they want, individual meals
- Family time
- Try new things
My husband loves to eat out, it is one of his favorite things to do. The atmosphere, the endless options, and mainly the convenience. He is always on the go type of guy and he hates to inconvenience me so he always prefers to just take us out to eat. Which if we had endless money then it would be no big deal! But I have to remind him how quickly it adds up and how we still are wasting time and food.
He orders way too much and we never eat it all so we pay more and waste more. We have been married for 10 years people so trust me I have tried to get him to understand but he just likes treating people no matter how much it costs. Which again would be no big deal if we had endless money.
Cons of eating out
- Expensive
- Time-consuming
- Waste food
- Bad service
- Judgment from other “perfect moms”
As I said above there are cons to eating out and one that I like to mention is the mom’s shame. It is a real deal. I literally get mom-shamed for not cooking home-cooked meals every night. As if we moms don’t have enough on our plates lets through a little guilt on there from another mom no less.
So let’s talk about the pros vs cons of cooking supper.
Pros of cooking
- Saves money if done correctly (not in my case though)
- Family time
- More nutritious
Really not that long of a list of pros and it could be that I am a little bias…because I think we have established I don’t care for cooking supper. Now let’s look at the cons of cooking supper which is more longer than the pro list for sure.
Cons of cooking
- Deciding the menu
- Shopping for ingredients
- Spending an hour cooking
- Spending an hour cleaning up
- No one can agree on the same meal
- Waste leftovers
- Waste leftover ingredients
- Stressful
- Overall can be a waste of time and money
So what is the solution then to all of this? Where am I going with this blog post? Well, I found a happy medium. I found something that pleases everyone involved. Well except maybe the mom shamer but if I slap this on a plate then she won’t know any different! Besides the obvious level of cooking is different.
I found a way to provide healthy, fresh, chef-prepared meals delivered to my door that everyone loves!
Freshly Prepared Meals Delivered to Your Door
There are so many different meal kit services out there and as I said I have tried one before and didn’t love it. I decided to give it another shot but this time I wanted to find out how to get freshly prepared meals delivered to your door. I didn’t want to have to cook anything. Just warm it up. That I can handle. I grew up on spaghetti-o’s so just popping something in the microwave for a few minutes was my thing.
My mom is a great cook and so is my grandma. My sister loves to cook and so does her husband. They both cook all the time but they also have four young kids so they are literally trying to feed an army. My daughter is like me. She would rather just eat spaghetti-o’s.
So if there was a way to have the best of both worlds, delicious healthy food, that I didn’t have to cook, that I just warmed up in the microwave, delivered to my door….well I would be in heaven!
I came across a company called Freshly that does just that. I was skeptical thinking this all sounds too good to be true, the food must taste bad or something? Nope. It is delicious!
Here is a long list of the pro of using Freshly!
Here is a pic of one of my meals. I only took a couple because I kept forgetting and I would be almost done eating when I thought “I should have taken a picture!”
Pros of Freshly Prepared Meals Delivered to Your Door
- Easy to pick from menu
- No searching for recipes
- Individual meals so everyone picks their own
- No driving to the grocery store and overspending
- No cooking and dirtying the kitchen
- No food waste
- No ingredient waste (I would never be able to use up all the leftover ingredients from each recipe)
- Easily freeze for later – no freezer bags or vacuum sealing
- Chef prepared = Delicious!
- Healthy and Nutritious
- Convenient
- Saves so much time!
- Don’t have to leave your house
- New meals added each week
- Try new things for much cheaper
- No driving to a restaurant
- No waiting for a table
- No bad service
- No tipping the waitress
- Free shipping
- No cleaning up afterward (you get to enjoy that family time)
- Only 3 mins to cook
- Perfect for lunches too
- Delivered fresh, not frozen
- Perfect for those that love to plan everything (me!)
- Budget-friendly (I love to budget and plan out as much as I can in life and this has helped get a hold of our food spending problem!)
That is just my list of pros. Here is a list of FAQ of Freshly and the pros of the company. Learn more about Freshly here.
These are a few of the obvious questions people asked so I linked directly to those answers for you.
Where Are The Meals Cooked?
I was surprised by this answer. They are cooked in giant kitchens in Arizona and Maryland. It is shocking to me that they can get here to Georgia so fast. I select my meals on Sunday and they are cooked, packaged, and delivered by Friday.
How Does Freshly Work?
You get to pick the meal plan that is right for you. We went with the 6 meals a week and that was just to test it out. I signed up to get my first two weeks at a discount and I thought that would be a perfect way to test out the food to make sure it tastes good.
Then after one week, we were already in love so I told a friend and sent her a link to get an even better discount than I got the first time. She got $40 off that they break down into two weeks. By giving her that discount I got $40 off for two weeks too!
So my first 4 weeks we got our meals at a discount which made it even all the better!
Here is picture number two of one of the meals that I was halfway through eating when I took the picture.
How Much Do The Meal Plans Cost?
How much do your meal plans cost?
If you click on that link it will tell you how much the plans are, they range from $8.99 to $12.50 per meal, depending on which plan you choose. Then if you decide to give it a try I can send you a link to get $40 off! Yes, just like I said above I get $40 off too if you use my link so that’s just a win-win! But that also means you can then share your link that they give you after signing up and get $40 off again when you share it with someone else. So theoretically you could just keep doing that and keep getting $40 off again and again!
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Does Freshly Change Their Menu?
How do I choose meals for the upcoming order?
Yes, they add new meals to their menu once a week. You can’t completely customize your menu to pick from just anything but you do get to choose from their current menu for that week. You just go to the app and scroll through the list of meals available to pick from that week, again new ones added each week, and that’s it!
Are Freshly Meals Healthy?
Freshly Philosophy on Nutrition
This is a very open-ended question. Everyone has a different view or issue they are looking for the answer to. This link takes you to the rabbit hole of all the other questions people are asking. From Gluten-free to Organic/Non-GMO.
How Does Freshly Stay Fresh?
How long will the meals last? How do you keep your food fresh?
The meals have a refrigerated shelf life of about 3-5 days. Since they are fresh and don’t use chemicals but they can be frozen by the “use by” date. They are packaged to withstand 60 hours of travel and delivery time. They explain all those details on how and why in the link above.
How are Freshly Meals Delivered?
This was answered above but they come in recycled material that you can recycle again and it shows up on the date you choose (which I believe depends on your location, I wasn’t able to choose) in a box on your door. You then just stick your pre-packaged meals in the fridge and when you are ready to enjoy one, pop it in the microwave for the time listed on the back (usually 3 mins or less)! Then just like that, you have a delicious nutritious meal!
Here is the third picture that I remembered to take. Don’t they all look so good!
Is Freshly Worth The Money?
In my opinion, yes absolutely! It is easy to think that spending $9-$12 a meal is a lot of money. Or to look at the weekly cost and think that is a lot to commit to each week. However, you can skip any week or every week if you want and I have spent way less money on eating out and wasted groceries since switching to Freshly.
My husband was out of town all week this past week so I just ate those meals and used this time to clean out the pantry while he was eating on his company all week.
Because of that, I am going to now go to the store and restock up so I decided I will skip next week’s meals. I just went into the app and hit skip. Since I also wasn’t sure about the next week either I went ahead and hit skip on it too.
I am able to take or skip each week as I please. We have gotten 5 shipments for the past 5 weeks so far and each meal has been delicious! I have honestly loved each meal. I have tried new things I never would have tried before!
During those past 5 weeks, I have only gone to the store to grab a few things for my daughter’s school lunches. I easily spend $300-$350 at the store for two weeks and then we still end up eating out. Since getting freshly I have only spent about $100 at the store and we have definitely eaten out less.
Plus with getting the discounts it has made out meals only around $7.50 a meal.
Now my husband can just grab one and take it to work and heat it up at lunch. No more packing a lunch and carrying around a lunch box as a grown man. Besides he never really did that anyway. This is much more convenient and appealing for him.
And when he normally would go out to eat every day for lunch I would be stuck at home eating leftovers. No, I look forward to quickly warming up a delicious meal and getting back to work on my computer!
Freshly Prepared Meals Delivered to Your Door
I am forever grateful and hooked on Freshly and how they delivered delicious, healthy, chef-prepared meals right to my door! Again if you want to try them out for yourself and get $40 off then use my referral link and try them out for yourself! Freshly does not allow me to share my link on my blog but it says I am allowed to email it to you. Use the form below to send me a request to email you the link.
Thanks for reading!
Vanessa
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