I love a meal plan. If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen a few of my handwritten plans appear previously. Sometimes though I am a bit out of inspiration and can’t face a week’s worth of pasta or rice and it’s nice to hand over the meal planning baton to a third party. Enter recipe boxes. I like to go home knowing that I have a meal ready and waiting, I just haven’t cooked it yet so when Marleyspoon asked if I would be interested in trying theirs out I was very much looking forward to its arrival.

When I got the box I was really impressed with how it was all packaged up. The chilled ingredients were still very cold, the brown paper bags were a nice touch and the handwritten labels all made it feel like a luxury box. The handy thing about the brown bags is that all the ingredients for each recipe are in each bag so when you’re ready to cook you grab a bag and go rather than scrabbling round the fridge and cupboards finding the ingredients. The first recipe I tried was Chicken with Aubergine Caponata and Polenta. I’ve never made polenta or caponata so was interested in trying this. The chicken drumsticks were absolutely huge so there was plenty of it to go round, as you can see my plate wasn’t quite big enough to hold it all comfortably. The recipe instructions were easy to follow and the meal was cooked within the 30-40 minute time guidelines. I really liked the caponata and would make it again when I had an aubergine, the chicken was full of flavour but I wasn’t that keen on the polenta (no fault of the polenta, it’s a personal texture thing).   The other recipe was Paneer Curry with Carrot and Kohlrabi Salad and Rice. This recipe starts with blending coriander and parsley together which I actually found quite hard to do. I used an immersion blender like the chap in the photo but I think using a food processor would be much easier! The smell of the fresh ingredients once blended was really nice. I liked that this came with a five rice mix and I found it cooked really well. The paneer was easy to cook too; I’ve had some before that didn’t fry as well. This meal was again quite large and looked very appetising once cooked. I didn’t have a lot of the kohlrabi salad, for me it was one thing too many, but it added a good crunch to the meal. The ingredients that came in the box were of a very high quality, the kind of ingredients that I would try to buy myself and of all the boxes I’ve tried to far Marleyspoon’s seemed to generate the least amount of packaging and rubbish. This may sound a bit funny but I thought the portion sizes were too large; both of the recipes could easily have fed three and with a bit more rice or polenta could have even fed four. This is the most expensive box that I have tried at £36 for four meals (two meals for two) including delivery. Currently you do get £10 off your first order making it £26. Although it’s expensive I think that’s down to the quality of ingredients and it does have a very high end, luxury feel to it.

To see how this recipe box compares to the others, take a look at my Recipe Box Comparison post here.

Thank you to Marleyspoon for the recipe box. All opinions expressed are my own.

Fairtrade Fortnight is running from 23rd Feb to 8th March this year and the theme for this year’s fortnight is: choose products that change lives. For me, the most important thing about choosing a fair trade product is knowing that I am making a difference to someone by making that choice. I don’t know about you but the most common fair trade food I see available is: bananas, sugar, coffee and chocolate.

For some reason I didn’t even think about tea being fair trade even though I have been buying Clipper tea for a while and it has the fair trade logo on and everything! Last year I made some Fairtrade shortbread to use as many fair ingredients as possible and I wanted to raise awareness of Fairtrade Fortnight again this year because as the film here shows, it is certainly worthwhile. read more