This year Mr LMH and I enjoyed celebrating Valentines night for the first time in nearly a decade together & it was lovely. We took the time to set the table, cook a 3 course meal and enjoy sharing a nice bottle of wine…all on a Wednesday night! It felt like such a treat & we vowed to make sure we made more effort on weeknights, this week we we’re lucky enough to be gifted a HelloFresh weekly meal plan box to try which seemed the perfect excuse to implement our new plan to make weeknights lovely. The box contained everything we needed to rustle up a tasty, fresh meal in around 30 minutes (including washing up time & some time to quickly set the table). Each night we set the table a little differently, using different crockery, glassware and candle holders to make each evening feel unique…who needs restaurants when you’ve a cupboard of mismatch plates and a HelloFresh box?
The first meal we cooked was a paella so naturally the sangria jug had to come out (we filled it with red wine as it’s way too cold for sangria in the UK at the moment), the blue splatter plates were handmade in Spain so seemed perfect to plate up the paella. Instead of a tablecloth I draped a hessian coffee sack over the table to add a little rustic touch and used a gin bottle as a candlestick (G&T’s were pretty much born in Spain right). I managed to create this in between the stages of cooking the paella. The paella itself was delicious, we will definitely be using the recipe card again for a midweek meal and it kept us full for the rest of the evening.
The second meal we had was Toulouse style sausage with mustardy lentils and garlic bread, which tasted AMAZING, I think this was actually my favourite meal in the box. It was really easy to rustle up and I will never be buying ready made garlic bread again (why do we even do that when it is so simple to make?). To style this one I paired back the table with grey two tone plates on a grey tablecloth with simple wine glasses and cutlery. To give the look a bit of something extra I added a reclaimed wood candleholder with a colour drip candle burning away in it (love these retro candles) and a vintage bread board to serve the garlic bread.
Friday nights are thai night in our house from now on thanks to HelloFresh’s Thai Spiced Chicken, this one seemed to be a little faffier (is that a word?) than the other meals but only in the sense that I used a couple more bowls and there was plenty of time whilst the chicken and rice were cooking away to get the washing up (and the table setting) done. The thai spices smelt amazing whilst cooking and don’t even get me started on the toasted coconut…I could easily have been waiting for dinner on an exotic holiday with a cocktail if I’d have shut my eyes. As it was Friday night we fancied eating a little more casual in front of a boxset so we served the meal in some blue splatter bowls with matching napkins, vintage brass bamboo cutlery and paired it with a beer…oh and lots of candlelit lanterns.
Now we’ve started to make more effort with our weeknights I’m going to really try and keep up with it…you can follow along and give me some little reminders over on Twitter and Instagram. How do you make weeknights lovely? If you fancy trying HelloFresh yourself they offer 50% discount on your first box…which makes your food shop that week an absolute bargain!
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