Month: February 2018

I was not paid by Hello fresh for this. I pay them, in fact, to get my food. They don’t even know I exist beyond getting my money. This is all my opinion and should be taken as such. Your experiences may vary. 

Food is my down fall.  Coming up with what to buy makes me want to poke my eyes out with a blunt object. Actually shopping for it is my own personal form of Dante’s Inferno. Did you know that you move the same object seven times before you eat it?? Shelf to cart –> cart to register –> buggy to car –> car to inside the house –>counter to place it is kept –> back onto the counter to use it –> then onto your plate. Ridiculous!

At the end of 2017 I began looking into my options for a healthier, fresher way to eat. Paleo? Keto? Whole 30? Stop caring and become fat? Nothing was hitting the mark for what I wanted which was a way to eat better and spend more time at home (less eating out which is something I waste a crap ton of time and money on every month) all while increasing our food range in regards to flavors and meals. Not too much to ask, is it?

Finally I hit on the meal kits which have flooded the market. I did a bunch of research, asked my friends for their experiences and landed on Hello Fresh. Mostly because their menu options were more regular food items that I could envision my son eating. I signed up for the family plan which has a minimum of four servings per meal and began at three meals a week, then switched to two meals a week because this farm didn’t come with a money tree.

I’ve been using them for over a month now and have to say I love it. I was skeptical as I am wont to be in general, but it has surpassed my expectations. A quick run down for those who don’t know how it works:

• Every week you get to choose what meals you want. The family plan is the most limited in terms of options. I get roughly 5-6 meals to choose my two from. The menu is set for 3 weeks in advance, so you don’t need to remember a specific day, but you do need to choose by the Thursday the week before or it defaults for you.
• You also pick the day of the week Mon-Sat you want it delivered. I chose Monday to make the beginning of the week better.
• I come home from work to a lovely big box filled with my week’s meals on my doorstep. Yum!
• There is a nice Hello Fresh app that makes all this super easy

What I like about the service:

• No shopping!! Well, that is not 100% true because I only get two meals a week, but it does limit my shopping significantly. I wish they had a 4 meal a week option because that would eliminate all my meal shopping.
• The meals come in separate bags in the box with the exact ingredients needed for that meal. When I want to make the cheesy hamburgers with onion jam, all I need to do is pull out the brown bag labeled with that meal and grab the meat. The bag contains the exact amount of garlic, peppers etc…

• Easy to cook meals. I am not a chef. I don’t aspire to be a chef. The meals on the family plan with Hello Fresh have been simple, do not require a bunch of cooking tools I don’t own and the cook times have been spot on.

• I can replicate the meals on my won. Aside from a few meals that have some generic “southwest spice packet”, most of the meals have been with regular ingredients that I could easily make on my own outside of the service in the future.

Some of the cons:

• No left overs. The meals are filling and nobody leaves the table hungry, not even my husband who eats enough for four. There aren’t many meals with left overs for the next day though so I do end up having to plan more meals for the week versus cooking on my own where every meal can last two or three days.

• Needs more veggies. The meat portions are spot on, but they are pretty stingy when it comes to the veggies. More of them would be nice. For instance, when the meal comes with a salad all it is is spring mix lettuce. No cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers etc…Veggies aren’t that expensive and it would level up the meal.
• Speaking of salad, they need a new “dressing”. A squeeze of a lemon and olive oil isn’t a dressing. It is gross. I make my own dressing anyway and substitute that, but for the price they could have you make a vinaigrette or something edible.
• Chicken and pork only. This is a family plan problem as my friend who does the classic has seafood and steak options that I don’t.

• Prep time lies. While the cooking times have been spot on, the prep apparently assumes you are a chef. 5 minute prep time, my butt. These meals are being toted as taking only 30 minutes to cook, but mine take about an hour. It is going a bit faster now that I am in the groove, but yeah…double the prep time in reality.
• The app/website is finicky. Every time I update it, it kicks out my log in and then claims I don’t exist. I then have to call the company and have them fix it.

All in all I am really enjoying the entire experience from choosing the meals to receiving it to the cooking and eating. Wyatt has enjoyed all the meals except the BBQ chicken which I figured he wouldn’t as he doesn’t like BBQ sauce. We are full, there is sometimes enough for me to take for lunch the next day and it makes me happy to see my box and cook something real. I am learning a lot of new techniques and Wyatt is enjoying a mom who actually cooks.

I’d highly recommend trying it. My cost is $8.75/serving/meal which is probably a bit higher than if I bought it all myself for some of the meals, but way less than eating out which is what we are using this as a substitute for. Try getting fajitas at a restaurant for $8.75 and have them be half as tasty as the pork ones I made at home.

When I first started endurance I jumped in head first and learned as I went. My first 25 was funny in hindsight. I showed up having had no dedicated conditioning. In fact, I had never even ridden Gem solo on trail at that point. Most of my “miles” were riding three days a week in the arena at the barn.

So there I was. Wintec AP saddle. Leather girth. AP cotton pad. Leather bridle and reins. No electrolytes. No clue what her heart rate was.

But I did it. Rode all 25 miles, fell off at mile 21 when she spooked because I was too tired to stay on, but we completed. Took 8th place in a big field too. Of course I had no clue that meant anything because the ride did awards for up to 6th only.

The point is I went out there looking like an idiot and completely clueless, did the thing and came away much more educated because of it. I traded the leather bridle for a nylon halter bridle. Bought electrolytes. Learned to take her heart rate. The next ride went better. And the next after that better still.

For some reason this hasn’t crossed over into jumping and eventing. I’ve tentatively put dozens of shows on my calendar and then talked myself out of every single one of them. I’ve convinced myself we aren’t ready. Maybe we aren’t. Probably we aren’t. But I’ll never know unless I go out there and do it.

There are a ton of schooling series going on right now. In fact, winter is my best shot at low level, low stress schooling shows. I saw another one pop up in my news feed and decided to do it. They offer an 18″ amoeba level three phase and it is only 2 1/2 hours away in GA.

Sure we are going to look green. Sure we are going to be out of place. Sure there is a 75% chance we will get eliminated in xc due to refusals. But I won’t know if I never try, so I double checked that Dusty was off that weekend and signed up. They are hosting an hunter pace on Sunday as well and I really want to do that in addition to the HT Saturday but logistics are killing that a bit. It is just far enough away that driving back and forth two days in a row doesn’t make any sense yet it is too close to home to justify a hotel for an overnight stay. Technically I could do what I did for endurance and sleep in my truck, but I have done that in the winter before and it sucks. No interest in freezing my tail off all night and then riding a hunter pace in the morning. It is worth it for an endurance ride, but not for that.

So…we will see if we die at the end of the month or not.

Sounds like a silly question, I know. Just ride longer! Ah…but there is more to it than that.

A rider I respect probably more than anyone else told me when I first got Gem to go into every ride with a single goal in mind. End when you reach it. If that takes two hours, so be it. If it take five minutes, ditto.

It stuck with me and is something I’ve always done with Gem whether that was out on the conditioning trail (pick my set pace and distance and even if everything felt amazing and was going super don’t be tempted into adding on just for the sake of adding on) or in the arena. I pick a goal for that ride and end when I reach it.

But….

Lately it has turned into really short rides. The jump school I did was only 20 minutes total. She was being so good and jumped everything I asked that it seemed redundant to keep asking her. What was the point? She wouldn’t be learning anything at that point and it only left room for her to misbehave or for her to answer the question wrong and it seemed counter productive to keep going.

The thing is that I want to ride for more than 20 minutes. Not only for our fitness levels but because I love riding.

So what do I do?

We are working on the basics right now. Bend, straightness, easy jumps to convert her from her old default of always saying no to her new one of always saying yes. Not too long ago she wasn’t jumpable because she wasn’t rideable. For her to go into it and not say no or be squirrelly a single time was a big huge deal.

I’m trying to meld my belief of stopping once the lesson is learned with my want to ride for longer than it takes me to tack up.

Part of this rambling issue is also my fear of pushing her. She is so fun to ride when she wants to be. Once she gets pushed past that point it is really no fun at all and honestly pointless since everything goes right out the window and she is no longer rideable.

Like in the lesson. The first half she was awesome and we got a lot accomplished but then she got tired (see the whole issue above about only riding for 20 minutes) and she shut down and the entire second half was fighting her and trying to get her to just trot nicely once again. No fun. Not productive.

So when I’m on my own and she is acting the angel and everything is unicorn farts and skittles, I don’t feel the urge to push beyond that and ask for more. I save that for the lessons. Of corse this means Gem is super fit for riding for 20 minutes only. Not useful either.

I guess after all that rambling I’m just trying to figure this new behaving and rideable Gem out. I want to ride for an hour. But I also want that hour to be productive and not turn into a major fight.

I go into the ride with a goal: ride an exercise from the jumping book or jump through a small course or whatever. On days Gem is being a saint, she gets it on the first few tries and then I stop. What else should I do? Add in another exercise? Work her more even though we have accomplished our task for the day? Since everything right now is centered on straightness and bend it seems odd to accomplish that one way then turn around and ask her to do it another way.

Any and all suggestions are welcome! I’ll ask Trainer next time I see her, hopefully at a xc school this weekend if the ground dries out enough and the course is open, too.

Thanks!!!