Gousto recipe delivery service

Unless you're fanatically skilled at meal planning and religiously re-stock your kitchen on a weekly basis, you'll no doubt have come home from work and opened the fridge to find some festering carrots, milk and butter from which to create your evening meal. We all lead increasingly busy lives, so sometimes food shopping falls by the wayside. And even if you do have a variety of ingredients to hand, devising ways to combine them into a tasty dinner can prove a time-consuming challenge. But what if you could choose a selection of tasty-sounding recipes for the week ahead and have the ingredients delivered to your door in just the quantities you need, with preparation instructions? Well now, residents of Oxford, you can: thanks to Gousto.

When I was invited to trial Gousto, I was reassured by the fact that their recipes are divided by difficulty rating - and a number of them looked so simple that not even I could mess them up. I'm definitely not a whiz in the kitchen, but I'm not an awful cook either: I just find I don't have time to prepare elaborate meals during the week. I selected two recipes from Gousto's website, a smoked trout summer salad and spicy tofu with coconut rice and waited for my delivery. Gousto is a subscription service: users choose to receive between 2 and 4 recipes per week, available for 2, 4 or 6 people (you better hope your household has an even number). Each week, you log on and select from a regularly updated collection of recipes, and ingredients are delivered to you on Thursday in a cool bag. Although I was concerned about the waste that would come with so many packaged ingredients, Gousto package items together where possible, and is as environmentally friendly where possible (for example, they use Wool Cool to keep produce fresh). In order to keep things as fuss-free and simple as possible, they provide every ingredient you need apart from salt and olive oil. That way, you'll never again have to come face to face with that mouldering half packet of mint you bought two weeks ago for that tabbouleh recipe.

Recipe 1: Glazed trout fillet with summer salad

Not something I would ever have thought to make, this seasonal recipe lured me in with it's one-star difficulty rating and 30 minute preparation time. The double-sided recipe card is photographic, guiding you through the ingredients you need and giving an overview of the dish, plus information on equipment needed and portion size before moving on to a step-by-step breakdown of how to make the recipe.

Eight steps to dinner

Instruction number one was certainly pitched at my level: 'Fill a medium sized pot with water and bring to boil, ideally using a lid'. Confidence boosted by managing to boil water, I worked my way through the 8 steps, chopping, marinating and mixing my way to an evening meal.

The steps were well broken-down and easy to follow: boiling the potatoes, making the dill, honey and mustard glaze for the trout, marinating the fish and making the rest of the salad (apple, beetroot, radish and cucumber). As a clumsy individual, I'm not much of a precision chopper, and managed to make a bit of a lash-up of the apple, but that aside, I managed pretty well. Apart from cooking the potatoes, no timings were given, but due to the simplicity of the recipe and the step-by-step approach, it didn't seem necessary. Instructions were succinct but thorough without being patronising, which I liked.

So this goes in here, yeah?

I totally know what I'm doing.

A couple of the ingredients were unlabelled, which almost proved disastrous when I reached for the coconut milk for recipe 2 instead of the sour cream, but the photographic depiction and a good old sense of smell sorted that issue out. And as for the end result? Impressive. The salad looked great but tasted even better, with a fresh combination of flavours. The glaze was delicious, and the contrast between the apple and beetroot was just right. Good work, Gousto.

The finished product! We'll make a chef of me yet...

Recipe 2: Black pepper spicy tofu on coconut rice

Spurred on by my success with the salad, I moved up to difficulty rating 2 (of a possible 3). Spicy tofu on coconut rice didn't sound too challenging, but there were more ingredients to deal with: onion, chilli, mange tout, ginger, garlic, rice vinegar and soy sauce.

Look,  I can chop an onion, OK?

I just can't chop mange tout length-wise

I began by chopping the onion, but 'cutting the mange tout in half length-wise' defeated me. Too fiddly by half: I chucked them in whole. I tried to stay on brief for the rest of the recipe, although I admit I had assistance with the rice (but only because my attention was focused on the vegetables, you understand). I found the lack of timings more of an issue with this recipe: some stages had timings, but the cooking of the rice didn't ('turn down the heat to let it simmer and stir regularly').

Frying the vegetables appeared to be timed to perfection, but unfortunately the 2 minutes allowed for 150ml of water to reduce just wasn't enough, and we ended up with rather a lot of excess liquid. The recipe was easy enough to follow and tasted good, but it wasn't as memorable as the trout salad. As for the slight sogginess, I'm not sure whether the quantity of water added needed to be reduced or the time allowed increased, but the recipe seemed to need a little tweaking. I admit I added extra black pepper to the end result, as it wasn't as flavoursome as the previous day's dish.

Overall, I think Gousto offer a great service. If you don't have time to plan your meals and shop accordingly, Gousto takes the stress out of dining at home, and is an easy way to ensure a varied and healthy diet. Recipes are developed by a team of chefs and updated each week, so you shouldn't get bored. Although it's clearly aimed at couples, families and house-shares, if you're cooking for one, you could easily take the second portion to work the next day for lunch. With prices starting from £4 per meal, the price is impressively reasonable given the quality of the ingredients (which is sourced from organic farms in the UK wherever possible). Despite their commitment to the environment, I do think that providing a new cool bag each week seems a little wasteful, as it seems like something that would be easy to reuse. I'm also a bit unsure about Thursday as a delivery day: although the ingredients for most dishes keep a minimum of 4 days, it seems to me that Monday would be a much more convenient day for most subscribers. Also, a maximum of 4 meals a week can be ordered currently: 5 seems to make more sense to me in order to cover the working week, but apparently the service will increase if the demand is there.

If you're looking to shake up your culinary repertoire and make your life a bit easier, give Gousto a try. There's no minimum commitment and you can place your order on hold at any time. For more information, check out their website.

Recipe: Borek

I mentioned in my review of Bodrum that their borek weren't as good as the tasty pastries created by my friend Sarah McMillan. Luckily for you, she's happy to share the recipe. Believe me, if they turn out like hers you won't be disappointed...


Sarah's a marketing manager from 9-5, and a make-up artist and keen cook outside of working hours. She recently started the food blog Food=Love, where she regularly shares her easy-to-emulate recipes.

Borek

I've  visited Turkey a number of times and I love Turkish food: it's just so fresh and tasty.

One of my favourite appetizers has to be Sigara Boregi or Borek, which are cigar-shaped filo pastries filled with feta cheese.

To make borek, you need:

3 sheets filo pastry

Filling:
1 block of feta cheese, crumbled
small bunch parsley, finely chopped
Pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)
Pinch of oregano (optional)

1/2 saucepan of sunflower oil for frying
1 small bowl of water

How to make borek:

Mix all of the filling ingredients in a bowl.

Place the three sheets of filo on top of each other vertically and cut in half from top to bottom. Then cut from one of the top corners to a bottom corner diagonally across to make 12 triangles of filo pastry. Cover the pastry with a damp tea towel until ready to use or else it will dry up and become difficult to roll.
Put one heaped teaspoonful of filling along the long side edge of each triangle of pastry. Then fold the two end corners in and roll up the triangle. Wet the open end with a little water from your bowl and press it closed. Be careful not to overfill or they will explode when frying!
Repeat until you've rolled all the sheets into cigar shapes.

Heat up the sunflower oil on the hob in a pan on a high heat. A good way to check if the oil is hot enough is to put a small piece of filo into the oil. If it starts to sizzle, then it's ready.
Turn the heat down to medium. Fry about 3 borek at a time (depending on the size of your pan) and fry the borek until they are a light golden colour. When they are done, use a slotted metal spoon to remove them and place them on a paper towel to soak up any extra oil.

Serve warm with houmous and salad as a light snack or alone as an appetizer.


Photo: Flickr/brododaktula

Recipe: Beetroot dip with sheep's cheese and walnuts

The Christmas excesses may be far behind us, but the dent it left in our finances probably isn't. As a result, dining out probably isn't high on your list of January priorities. With this in mind, it seems a good idea to offer some recipe ideas in addition to reviews. Now I'm not the most creative in the kitchen, but fortunately my friend Tom is a bit of a culinary whiz.


In the first of series of simple, seasonal recipes, musician, cook and aspiring food writer Tom Rees serves up a dish good enough to win over the most hardened of beetroot critics.




Beetroot Dip with Sheep’s Cheese and Toasted Walnuts

 

In the past couple of years I’ve become a serious beetroot convert. I’m not talking about the pickled stuff in jars which I dreaded as a child, but about fresh roots with their wonderful earthy sweetness and autumnal aroma. Raw beetroot makes a superb accompaniment to beef, particularly when paired with celeriac and a vinaigrette thick with dijon mustard, and it is among my favourite additions to a green salad. It is equally delicious boiled or roasted, but this serves to accentuate the sweetness of the root, so it's even more important to pair it with something sharp or salty for contrast.

This recipe is based on an exquisite beetroot and feta dip I ate at Sam and Sam Clark’s tapas bar Morito about a year ago. The walnuts and the tangy sheep’s cheese in my version temper the sweetness of the beetroot, while the lemon juice and the parsley add freshness to the finished dish. Thickly spread onto slices of rye bread it’s a joy to eat, and somehow all the more enjoyable for the way it stains your mouth and your fingertips.