Who says carrots are not a meal??

One of our daughters is at a Steiner school with lovely kids, teachers and parents, and as we were helping out with props and sewing today for the upcoming musical, I found myself out of my league during the lunch break.

Homemade lentil soups, salads and talk about foods I don’t even know the existence of, and there I was with my (alufoil wrapped – oh noooooo) sandwich with cheese and vacuum packed ham, drinking water out of a reused PET bottle. Hahaaaaaa – they may not even have noticed, but I suddenly got another benchmark for living a life with healthy food.

A year ago, I would have had been even further out of league – but luckily, I found “Hellofresh” last year, and our (eating) life has never been the same since. Beautiful fresh ingredients in exact amounts, recipe steps to follow and therefore a fully risk free dive into cooking healthy, awesome looking, culturally diverse dinners with the family. The kids take turns on the cooking team, chopping away all the exotic vegetables we couldn’t have recognised if it wasn’t for the pictures on the recipes – and those not on the cooking roster automatically clean up the whole thing afterwards.

For nearly 20 years, I have been very honest about cooking not being one of my fortes (alongside cleaning), and have scraped by in the dinner department with “chicken with rice and carrots” alternated with “beef with pasta and broccoli” with the odd day of “stir-fry” (=emptying the fridge). I was absolutely happy with this choice, accepting the lay of the land.

Then I met Hellofresh. And one evening shortly after, as we sit down at the dinner table, my husband takes the first bite and pronounces a truly felt acknowledgement of how great it tasted. Much to my surprise big tears started running down my cheeks!!!! We all burst out laughing – but in that moment my old belief of “it’s good enough as it is” was blown out of the water. With tears running, it obviously HAD been much more important to me than I had admitted to myself. Cooking a nice tasting meal for the family.

So one step at a time, I’m getting closer to appreciating the nurture and health in a well-cooked, varied meal. My family knows how dearly I hold the weekly box – it is 3 guaranteed successful meals, and then the other 4 nights are absolutely fine at whatever level of toasties, omelette, pizza, yoghurt or whatever we do.

So today I learned what my next benchmark is: creating healthy food for me and my family for the other day parts…. Warning, warning: alu-foil-packed-ham-and-cheese-sandwiches, your time is short-lived. Thank you for the simplicity and daily joy so far, I’m going for next level.