15 July 2015

Gousto #1: Harissa Chicken Curry

Our first meal from the Gousto delivery box was Harissa Chicken Curry.

The ingredients

The box provided just eight ingredients for this recipe:
Top: lentils, harissa paste, a nub of ginger, a chicken stock cube. Bottom: filthy potatoes, two spring onions, diced chicken breast and some yoghurt.
Along with salt, pepper and oil from the pantry, this was everything I needed to make the meal, and all in the correct volume. I found it strangely satisfying to have no leftover ingredients at the end, even though one of my favourite things about cooking is looking in the fridge and coming up with ideas to use up all of the nubs and stubs of yesterday's leftovers (after all, I did come-of-age in the Ready Steady Cook epoch of man). 

It was all organised very well. Really, the only downside was the childish wackywriting Gousto uses to signify it is an honest and simple brand. I'm beginning to find this marketing technique a bit wearying after 15 years (Innocent Smoothies kicked off the trend in 1999). So we inevitably had ingredients labelled with quirky names like 'gorgeous ginger', 'poh-tay-to poh-tar-to' and 'spread-your-legs spring onions', which didn't raise much of a smile and really only made it harder to find what I needed when I was delving through all of the other ingredients in the box.

The recipe

The recipe card was very easy to follow: 
  1. Chop and fry the potatoes - sounds easy, but the potatoes kept sticking to the pot, and then flying off across the kitchen when I tried to loosen them... I assumed we weren't meant to brown the potatoes. Certainly there was no mention of that.
  2. Add the chicken and some paste and fry off - you're supposed to fry until brown, but the chicken was quite soggy from sitting in its own juices in a plastic bag for several days so I just settled for white.
  3. Add the lentils, grated ginger, seasoning, half the chopped spring onion whites, the stock cube dissolved in half a liter of water, the rest of the paste and a dollop of yoghurt and simmer until delicious - they recommended 7 minutes, I ended up at closer to 10 for the potatoes to be done.
  4. Serve with the rest of the yoghurt - seasoned with salt, pepper and the rest of the spring onion whites - and sprinkle with spring onion greens.
It was fairly foolproof really, and I'm fairly certain this recipe would work well if you just put all the ingredients (bar the garnish) raw and cold into the pot, brought to a simmer for 15 minutes and then served. Browning the chicken really achieves next to nothing in terms of flavour when also paired with the chicken stock and harissa paste, while the frying of the potatoes might take a few minutes off the simmering time but otherwise had little discernible effect.

I followed the recipe to the letter and it took 30 minutes from start to finish, rather than the advertised 15, but this is still pretty quick dish to prepare and frankly only salad takes 15 minutes.
Alas, I forgot to scatter spring onion greens randomly across
the table top, as shown in the photo accompanying the recipe
The taste

The curry was very nice indeed - and my husband declared it thoroughly delicious - so this is something I'll probably make again. It's very good comfort good, possibly better suited to autumn and winter, and I think the only changes I'd make would be to swap the chicken out for some veg or butterbeans (the chicken didn't add much, in terms of flavour, and I'm loathe to slaughter another animal just to provide easy protein), and also perhaps finish with a splash of lemon juice or wine vinegar to brighten.

It was also a generous portion, I'd say the meal for 2 would easily stretch to feed three.

I'd score this meal 8 out of 10, if assessed as a homely, work night meal.

Value for money

I wondered how much this meal would cost if I just bought the ingredients via Ocado, which has all the convenience of home delivery but would not offer the advantage of eliminating leftover ingredients. Still, a jar of harissa can sit happily in the fridge for the next meal, while lentils, potatoes, ginger and spring onions can always find later use in the weeks and months to follow.

To buy these ingredients and then throw away all of the leftovers would cost £11.74, which actually makes Gousto cheaper than Ocado. Even if I take a conservative estimate of what I might use up in other dishes (with some throw-away of random off-cuts - for example, I rarely use a whole hand of ginger) it comes to £7.09 in total, which compares very well to Gousto's £5 per portion (which also offers extra advantages such as not needing to plan ahead or think of new dishes to make).

That said, the chicken accounts for a lot of the cost. If I replaced the poultry with butterbeans - as I probably would, for sake of my own health and that of the chicken - we're looking at £2 a portion. Which, as luck would have it, is about the price of this meal once the discount voucher used.

Conclusions...

Would I recommend Gousto? I think I'll need to try the remaining recipes before I decide. I wouldn't recommend it to enthusiastic and experimental home cooks, nor to harried workers with no time for cooking (Gousto doesn't really meet the needs of either of those). However, it's certainly looking promising for those who like to cook - or more to the point, who like to eat homecooked food - but don't have any time to think about what they actually want to eat.

I suspect when my daughter is born next month, that latter group might start to include me...

13 July 2015

Let the Gousto Experiment Commence

I found a £25 gift voucher in my Amazon delivery last week, for something called 'Gousto'. It was a slow enough afternoon and a high enough discount to make me want to go find out what Gousto actually is.

It transpires Gousto is Timo and James, two humans on Homeworld who'll send you a box of ingredients portioned out for the various recipes you select, along with recipe cards so you can put the food back together like in the photos. At least, that's what they say.

You can order from around ten possible meals each week, so I ended up picking two portions each of this lot:

Images courtesy of Gousto.co.uk, your one stop shop for Gousto orders
Well, I thought £25 off seemed like it would be next to free, but I still had to pay £12.99 on top. I wouldn't ordinarily be willing to pay £35 for six home cooked meals, but the discount made it only £2 around per portion which definitely made it worth a try. 

The food parcel was delivered today. It didn't quite look the like the overflowing cardboard cornucopia pictured on the website, but I recognise it's hard to 'style' two spring onions, a yoghurt pot and a couple of buns (the rest was wrapped up in sheep's wool to keep it cool).

I'll update this blog later in the week so you can see if the meals turned out anything like in the pictures. Unfortunately I don't have any terracotta flowerpots to serve my harissa chicken curry in, and my white-washed 18th century trestle table is down the dry cleaners at the moment, but I will struggle through as best I can.