Gousto review: Day 1

Gousto is a service that sends you the ingredients for three meals. Every week they offer ten different recipes, and all you have to do is select the three that you most like the sound of, say whether you want them for two or four people, and choose a delivery date. The idea is that it's cheaper than shopping at a supermarket and means that you don't have to go out hunting for all of the ingredients yourself. I always struggle to think of things to make for dinner and end up making similar meals all the time (my stock ingredients are paprika, tomatoes, chicken, and peppers), so I really liked the sound of this. I chose two meals that were a bit "out there" for me (Thai salmon fish cakes and goat's cheese Bulgar risotto) and one safe recipe (pork chops and caramalised leeks), in case the other two went completely wrong!

My ingredients were delivered in a huge box which was so exciting to open! Although I knew exactly what was being delivered I still wasn't completely sure what to expect, and I have to say that I was really impressed. Not only was everything carefully packaged (the meat and fish were specially wrapped in wool insulation), they also included a little folder to store my recipes in and a few free snacks!

I currently share a house with another couple and we take it in turns to cook every other night, so I ordered my recipes for four people rather than two. It should have been £50 (about £4 per person per meal) but as I had a half-price voucher I only paid £25. It might seem like a lot of money to pay upfront for three meals, but if you consider the cost per person then you really do seem to be getting a bargain.

Now, I'm not the best at photography, but hopefully you'll still be able to get a decent impression of what everything is like! (Fingers crossed...)

*icing sugar, coke, and grated lemon not included ;)

In the spirit of trying new things, I went with the Thai salmon fish cakes first. I don't tend to make meals where all of the ingredients are things that I'm not familiar with (if I try something new it's usually with other flavours or ingredients that I know I like), however I was curious to see how it would go!

And here's all of the ingredients for the fish cakes laid out.

I thought the recipe card was really easy to follow and broke everything down nicely. I struggled to keep to the timings a little bit, but that was partially because I spent about 5 minutes trying to dig my blender out of the pan cupboard and partially because I'm about as co-ordinated as a penguin. It was great to have all of my measurements already sorted out - I'm often put off by recipes that need lots of different ingredients that aren't very multi-functional because I know that whatever's left after the meal will more than likely end up getting thrown away (in this case it'd be the fish oil and red wine vinegar, which I never use in day-to-day cooking). In that way I loved getting to try a new dish without having any leftover products.

And here's the final result! Our housemates weren't in for dinner that night and naively Alex & I thought we could tackle two portions each, but we were so wrong. Even half of that amount of rice would have been really filling. Unfortunately, neither of us were fans of the fish cakes. If I hadn't included the mint then I think it would have been fine, so if I do make this again I might try swapping the mint for lemon.

Nevertheless I'm still glad that I got to try something new and I'm looking forward to the other two recipes!