Tonight I prepared bibimbap.  As part of my program to change my eating habits I’ve subscribed to Hello Fresh.  Every week the company sends me a box containing pre-measured food, recipes, and seasonings.  I’m eating a vegetarian box this week.

Hello Fresh ships me three veggie meals for two people (six meals total) every week for $60. It isn’t exactly cheap, but I have to break my horrible eating habits, and Hello Fresh is a powerful tool for this kind of change.  They send me food I would never purchase, and recipes I would never bookmark.  The cost represents a large portion of my grocery budget, so I can’t afford to call Pizza Hut if it’s a disaster.  (If I gave myself that escape route I’d call The Hut and skip cooking altogether.)  It’s eat Hello Fresh or go to bed hungry.

So far I’ve cooked Hearty Minestrone (OK), the Forbidden Rice Salad with Roasted Butternut Squash, (worth a repeat), and tonight the scary-looking Bibimbap with Carrot and Zucchini Ribbons.

While the bibimbap tasted great (YEA!!!!!) the cooking process was not so easy.  This is mostly my fault.  My skills for cooking vegetables are  . . . um . . . I don’t have any.  Due to my general incompetence, every recipe takes at least two hours to prepare, including You Tube time.

My biggest bibimbap failure was that I couldn’t get everything finished at the same time, so the rice at the bottom of the bibimbap was cold, while the eggs and mushrooms on top were hot.  Guess I have something to work on.

Rice cooking is giving me fits!!!  I can’t get it right.  It’s always too wet, or too sticky, or gummy.  I’ve watched videos and read tons of suggestions, but I’m still missing something.

The other difficult part were the mushrooms.  I read the label “wash before using,” so I washed them, only to later find out from UptownGroupFood’s YouTube video that using water is a mistake because they absorb all the water like a sponge, which increases the cooking time.  (Not to mention wash water would be dirty, which negates the cleaning process.)  When I cooked the mushrooms I started to think they might stick to the pan, so I stupidly added olive oil.  Olive oil that was absorbed into the mushrooms and quadrupled the cooking time.

I learned how to peel ginger with a spoon!  New skill!  Thank you, Miranda Valentine video.

The most difficult — heck, most dangerous — part of the recipe involved thickening a sauce, which seems like a simple process, but Hello Fresh didn’t bother to warn me that placing a sauce containing garlic, ginger, soy sauce and sugar in a hot pan would result in a fume cloud causing burning eyes and choking!  I could barely stir the sauce.

Given all my mishaps I didn’t have high hopes for the meal, but I’m pleasantly surprised.  I ate my one serving, and I’ll try to eat the other serving for dinner tomorrow night.  (Eating leftovers is also a skill I need to acquire.)