Life's busy, and good intentions to cook can crumble after a long day. Gousto has set out to simplify home cooking with their weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or ad hoc recipe box delivery service. Gousto deliver with everything needed to cook: foolproof recipes plus fresh, perfectly measured, high-quality ingredients. It's everything you need for dinnertime with no food waste and no fuss.

In March I signed up to Gousto using an introductory offer as COVID-19 swept the world and people began panic buying everything from loo roll to lasagne sheets. It seemed like the perfect time to hunker down, try new things and eat well; Gousto helped with all three and has since been jokingly crowned 'the highlight of lockdown' in this household.

Rolling into the seventh month as a fortnightly Gousto subscriber, cooking four meals per delivery for two people (approx £34 per delivery), Gousto is still hitting the mark for two 20/30-somethings who miss going out to eat 'the old-normal' way and are not naturally adventurous cooks. Thanks to the simple nature of Gousto, instead of reaching for freezer food or a takeaway menu, we've been cooking and loving it.

Gousto as a whole is a very seamless service with a simple desktop and mobile-friendly interface that makes selecting, chopping and changing recipes easy right up until two or three days before you're expecting them. The available recipes change weekly and vary enormously across meat dishes, healthy meals, 10-minute recipes, fish and more. Eating a meat-free, fish and veggie diet with Gousto has not yet become boring.

Gousto's consistently fresh and high-quality produce, paired with the slick service, validates the price point, with most dishes working out at around £4.37 per portion; an amount easily matched when nipping out to a small supermarket. The recipes are as simple as they claim and the cooking times are mostly accurate (though admittedly the 10-minute meals usually take us 20). The flavour palettes and cuisine styles have mostly been incredible and any meal we felt blasé about was usually down to inattentive selecting.

While Gousto doesn't teach you the basics of cooking in a practical sense, it does teach you how to build on your cooking skills in a way that continuously evolves. The seamless service has changed our eating habits and cooking routine for the better by teaching us spice and flavour pairings, as well as how simple seasoning food can be. After seven months we've amassed a wad of recipe cards which we often refer back to when in need of a good salad dressing or sauce, or even to recreate favourite meals on non-delivery weeks.

Some of our favourite recipes so far have included: crispy tofu in a satay sauce, a 10-min spicy halloumi stew, vegan tapas burgers with bravas relish, crispy miso fish burgers, Goan prawn balchão, posh fish fingers sandwiches and smoky fish with curry butter sauce. Practically none of which would have been cooked in this house if it weren't for this service.

Since their launch, Gousto have listened to customer concerns over sustainability and plastic and have drastically reduced single-use plastic packaging, now delivering chilled items in efficient cardboard ice boxes known as the 'Eco Chill Box', and have pledged to make all Gousto-branded plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable by the end of 2022. If their ethos continues to evolve as fast as their menus, and our cooking skills, we'll no doubt be receiving Gousto deliveries for a long time to come.

Though this article contains affiliate links, it is an independent review, written without the support of Gousto. View the latest Gousto offer.