Easy dinners with Recipe Matchmaker

Easy dinners become second nature to busy parents. We all have our favourites some of which we are proud of and some of which might  sometimes fall into the ready meal or less than healthy varieties. I love to cook but find the pressure to come up with something interesting night after night a bit of a challenge. I have just discovered an amazing tool from  HelloFresh. It’s called ‘Recipe Matchmaker’ and I highly recommend easy dinners with Recipe Matchmaker.

How Easy Dinners with Recipe Matchmaker works

You enter what you fancy  easy dinners wise perhaps protein, rice or pasta and then you decide if you want something quick and easy, adventurous or child friendly. Then there’s an option to include any dietary options so you know for sure that you family are eating safely. The matchmaker then offers up some of HelloFresh’s delicious recipes. The only challenge I had is that the recipes sound so tempting that it can be difficult to just pick one. That’s good though as it means with some clever meal-planning we can have amazing meals night after night.

Easy dinners with the help of my son

My teenage son would like to be a chef in the future. He is happier in the kitchen than he is when gaming and he loves video games! As part of our home education journey, we cook together at lot from easy dinners to more complex affairs. There is so much learning in cookery from mathematics  and science to food history. Reading recipes is good for literacy and sometimes we mix it up with foreign recipe books so we can learn a different language too along the way. Ramsey decided that we should try a special chicken stir fry as our first attempt at recipe matching with HelloFresh.

Learning through stir-frying

We learned some practical things as we cooked. Ramsey worked out that a large saucepan of water can be very heavy. He decided to empty some of the water out and to use a jug to add more water once the pan was on the stove. We boiled the water and cooked our noodle nests. We loved the tip about cooling the noodles so that they do not continue to cook in the warm water after you turn the heat off.

We always love using my late mum’s mixing bowl. It brings back memories of her and special times together. It is very old and we treat it carefully. We prepared the chicken and added Chinese 5 spice. Again the recipe was good as it gave a warning that this addition can be strongly-flavoured so to add with caution according to taste.  It was also very good to have the  reminder about washing hands when dealing with raw meat. That gave me another opportunity for incorporating learning with a bit of a health and safety lesson.

We prepared onion, red pepper and garlic. We don’t cook with ginger often so we bemoaned the shapes it comes in and decided we would look up how to peel it easily. We grated the ginger and the smell was utterly delightful.

It was good as we added different ingredients to the our new wok to discuss the different cooking times for different sorts of food. We did make a slight error when some of the peppers and onions got mixed up together but we know we learn from when things go wrong as much as from when they go right. It was not the end of the world.

Healthy and tasty chicken stir-fry

The meal was fun to make and we learned so much along the way. The easy dinner tasted superb and I loved the ginger coming through. The meal did not feel at all oily and felt perfectly balanced. It was great to know that some really healthy food options were in what effectively is a one-wok cookery project.

Recipe Matchmaker

You can see I am impressed with the Recipe Matchmaker from HelloFresh. It gives inspiration on those days where I am feeling tired or lacking in motivation. It is useful every day of the week especially as we are now using it as a tool for building our meal plans and accompanying shopping lists. This means we are eating healthily, cutting down on food waste and saving money. I work from home and am using Recipe Matchmaker as an educational tool with my  children.  Recipe Matchmaker would help people who commute to work often dashing in later in the evening without a clue what to cook. I can also see students finding it helpful. Although it helps with easy dinners ,it can also be used for special events such as date nights and dinner parties.

Do you fancy trying easy dinners with Recipe Matchmaker?