I’ve been tossing around the idea of doing a self-improvement challenge on tumblr, and one of the tasks is to cook a meatless meal. I actually have a good number of recipes in my repertoire, so I thought it might be useful to other people if I shared a few of my favourites!

I found all of these through ordering Gousto, a UK-based recipe box service, but you should be able to access the recipes themselves without being subscribed. We’ve been getting their boxes for about eight years now, first once a fortnight and now once a month (with occasional interruptions). If you’re interested, you can read my review at the end of this post (and I can send you a referral discount code if you hit me up online).

Apologies in advance to any beans/legume haters, this post is not for you.

The recipes

Cheesy Black Bean Chilli (link)

This is one of Gousto’s ten minute recipes, but we tend to quadruple the ingredients (except the water addition - use about 500ml) for batch cooking purposes. You can probably expect Step 5 to last about 10-15 minutes if you do. The essential ingredients are pretty long-lasting, making it a good flexible option for any meal planning. When served with rice, this recipe goes a lot further, and we usually manage to get at least 10 servings out of an 8 serving batch, if not more.

Oh, make sure you get a potato masher for this, I can’t imagine doing this with a fork for more than 4 portions.

Potential removals:

• • Spring onion: garnish only, free to remove (I have tried for a long time to like spring onion but it’s definitely something I only tolerate)

Optional replacements:

• • Plain tortillas: Rice is the obvious choice. We also very rarely just get plain tortillas but get the ones shaped like a bowl or cone from Old El Paso, as it’s very messy to eat otherwise (I am almost certainly doing something wrong).
• • Tomato frito: I buy 400g cans of frito from local store Lupe Pintos, but I’m pretty sure other tomato sauces will work as a substitute.
• • Cheese: The meal definitely needs some kind of garnish, so if you’re removing both the spring onion and the cheese, it’s a good idea to at least replace the latter - crispy fried onion worked for one lactose-intolerant dinner guest.

10-Min Lentil Ragu (link)

Another good option for batch cooking, but again, don’t expect it to take 10 minutes if you do. I actually prefer this with fusilli rather than spaghetti, but if you’re using non-quick-cook pasta, make sure to start the pasta early (we keep forgetting about this).

Potential removals:

• • Chestnut mushrooms: ours is not a mushroom household (1 hater, 1 indifferent)
• • Basil leaves: garnish only, ours is not a basil household (1 hater, 1 indifferent)

Optional replacements:

• • Tomato frito (see chilli recipe above)
• • Marmite: I promise I promiiiiiissssse it’s good, it’s just for an extra kick of flavour, my friend Robin was horrified when she saw me put the Marmite in but then she agreed the end result was good I PROMISE. BUT, you can find some replacement options here.

Try to keep:

• • Spring onion: not garnish, and very integrated with the meal, so doesn’t tag my personal “anti-spring-onion” tendencies (and it’s a free extra veg)

Indian-Style Nachos with Coconut Raita (link)

Or, “chickpea curry”. This is my emergency meal because, if you do the chickpea curry portion only and swap out the nachos for rice, it’s about as quick as the above and very easy to use with relatively shelf-stable ingredients. I keep the following in my cupboard for this recipe specifically, so I can break out a 4-person serving whenever my meal planning falls short:

• • 2 cans chickpeas
• • 1 can cherry tomatoes
• • 1 spare unopened jar of Very Lazy Ginger or alternative
• • 1 unopened jar of mango chutney

Plus my general replace-as-used supply:

• • Tube of garlic paste (though I often just have a bulb kicking about)
• • Tube of tomato puree
• • Curry powder
• • Vegetable stock cubes
• • Basmati rice (though the nachos are very tasty)

That’s all for now! If anyone else has any good vegetarian recipes I would love to see them 👀

This bit is really only for people who are vaguely intrigued about the recipe boxes themselves

I started doing Gousto when Remi moved in with me back in about 2017. I knew how to cook a few recipes, she didn’t. She also describes herself as a ‘picky eater’, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate, it is true that a couple of her nope ingredients are very common in recipes (bell peppers and coriander, for instance).

We weren’t sure where to start, until my parents bought us a subscription of Gousto as a Christmas present. After eight years, we have two recipe binders: the new one, which stores stuff we haven’t yet tried a second time (and gets cleared out every so often), and the main binder, which includes all of the recipes that have been good enough for us to try multiple times, including about a dozen recipes that are in regular rotation (we usually pick out 1 meat and 1 veggie option a week).

Nowadays, we order one box a month with two 4-portion recipes, in order to try new things, and we almost always have to whittle down the choices a bit. It’s very easy to pause and restart the subscription if the timing doesn’t work for you or if money is tight.

I’ve not tried any other recipe boxes, but I’ve heard stories from friends and relatives about Hello Fresh’s attitudes to customer retention (ie aggressive, invasive, a bit scammy). If you pause Gousto for long enough, they’ll eventually send you vouchers to entice you back, but that’s pretty much it, or at least it was the last time I went on an extended break. Delivery is regularly a little bit of an annoyance, though that seems to be inevitable with the setup - there’s no point trying to redeliver a box of fresh food, so the driver will usually leave it on a doorstep if they can’t (allegedly) get access. On the rare occasions when problems have arisen (box gone missing, ingredient issues) we’ve been able to report it through the app and get a quick refund.

They have done some genuinely cool innovations over the years to cut down on plastic waste, which I appreciate.

The recipes themselves are easy to follow, but it’s worth noting that if you are a starter cook, they will absolutely not be as fast as the recipe suggests they are (especially the 10 minute meals), and can be tricky to do if you don’t have someone cooking alongside you. In the old days, the instructions would very occasionally be confusing to the inexperienced - we briefly struggled over the phrase ‘a ragu-like consistency’ - but never to the extent that we couldn’t follow along, and they’ve continued to refine their instructions.

A lot of the stuff we liked the look of included fresh coriander, but we always ditched it and usually still got something tasty out of it.

It’s worth noting that while Gousto recipes are delivered in 2 portion or 4 portion boxes, in practice any meat-related recipes generally need to be cooked in 4 portions if you’re ordering the ingredients yourself to avoid waste. (That suits our household as we love leftovers. A whole extra meal you don’t have to cook!) However, the veggie options are a lot easier to cook in smaller batches.

Sorry to anyone north of Aberdeen who wants to try fresh food recipe boxes, though - my grandparents regularly update us on the fact that nobody is willing to ship to them, and yes, they are still getting contacted by Hello Fresh wondering why they’re not spending money.