“Discover the UK’s highest rated recipe box” is the message you’re given when you visit the website for Mindful Chef: a service that delivers nutritionist-designed recipes and the ingredients needed to make them to your door. Each week, they offer 20 different recipes to choose from, with a variety of box sizes to suit everyone from singles to larger families.
I recently won one of their competitions on Instagram, and was sent a box containing two family recipes (each designed to feed four people) as my prize. On the face of it, the concept sounded fantastic: precisely measured ingredients for zero food waste, every recipe dairy and gluten-free, no refined carbs, consistent calorie counts, and recyclable cool bag packaging, for a start. Customers can choose which recipes they’re interested in from that week’s selection and how many people they want them to serve, and then simply sit back and wait for them to arrive.
On the day of my delivery, I was kept updated as to my order’s progress, but also knew I didn’t have to be home to receive it – the packaging is designed to keep the ingredients cool. It was pretty well packaged too, with the proteins for my recipes in a chilled bag, and everything else packed into two separate brown paper bags, one per recipe, with the recipe number on the printed label.
The number corresponded to the recipes printed in the weekly recipe book that I received – I loved the fact that I was sent all of the week’s recipes, rather than just the two I received ingredients for…it gives me more inspiration for future meal planning!
Each of the recipes details the ingredients that Mindful Chef provides (with allergens listed in bold), along with the cooking time, calorie count, and the amount of protein, carbs and fat, for those who are tracking such things. Dotted throughout the recipe book, you’ll find other info on the recipe pages, like the fact that they use sustainably sourced fish and grass-fed British beef, as well as QR codes to scan for cooking and food prep tips.
The first night’s meal was a creamy salmon and broccoli pasta dish, with a fair few ingredients and which involved using quite a bit of kitchen equipment! The sauce was cooked in one pan, the salmon fillets in the oven, the penne and spinach in a further pan, before using this same pan again for the broccoli. The recipe was easy enough to follow, and the quantity of the dish it made was vast – more than enough for the three of us for the evening meal, and a generous amount for lunch the next day, too.
Meal number two was a pesto-rubbed steak with an Italian-style potato salad: flat iron steaks (which I love, but have never actually bought to cook at home), and a salad of new potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, olives, garlic, parsley and red onion pickled in cider vinegar.
A nice easy one to make, this: I just needed to cook the potatoes and beans, slice and pickle the red onion, chop the rest of the ingredients and cook the steaks, coating them in red pesto for the final few minutes of the cooking time. The result? An incredibly delicious summery meal with very little effort, which I’ll absolutely be recreating again in the future.
The Mindful Chef menu changes weekly, with free nationwide delivery, seven days a week, and a flexible subscription – once you buy a recipe box, you’re not then tied in for ages. Prices vary depending on the meals you choose, but tend to start from around £4.25 per person – and you’ll find regular discount codes available too, to make your recipes boxes cheaper.
What I do also love about Mindful Chef is their focus on sustainability: they’re a registered B Corp, they work closely with small, family-run British farms and other suppliers, they donate a school meal to a child living in poverty for every recipe they sell, and their insulated packaging can be returned to be reused again. With all this in mind, it did surprise me to see how much plastic was included in our delivery, but according to the literature that came with the box, they’re working on bringing waste levels down even further.
For those who want to enjoy ethically sourced, delicious and healthy meals without needing to spend hours meal planning and shopping, Mindful Chef is a great shout – for individuals, couples and families alike. Recommended.