Emily Roberts is delighted by her first experience of a Riverford vegetarian recipe box

I don't have the skills to create my own dishes, but when following recipes I'm renowned for forgetting to buy a vital ingredient and substituting it with something else, which has ended in numerous dining disasters.

Riverford's new recipe boxes offer the chance to create healthy, fresh meals from scratch using top quality ingredients from a local farm (Upper Norton Farm in Sutton Scotney), without the hassle of shopping or weighing out ingredients.

Plus there is the added bonus of following a recipe with simple instructions, which even someone with the most basic of culinary skills could understand.

It seemed like the perfect compromise - yes, I would have to spend some time in the kitchen, but I would be saving time traipsing round a supermarket.

Riverford has a selection of different recipe boxes, which change each week offering three organic meals with a step-by-step recipe card and all the ingredients in exact quantities - perfect.

When my vegetarian box arrived, delivered by a rather chirpy man, it was an exciting moment unpacking all the produce and discovering what I would be eating for dinner over the next few nights.

The fresh vegetables filled up my fridge, including one I had never come across before.

But the information pack provided included a handy A-Z guide of vegetables, explaining all the different varieties you might find and how to prepare them.

My husband wasn't too impressed that we would be eating vegetarian food over the next few days, and was justifiably apprehensive about my ability to execute the dishes, but I persuaded him to give it a go before starting to prepare the first meal - socca crepes and asparagus with blue cheese, spring onions and tomato salad, below.

Sensibly, I fully read the instructions before starting and then followed them exactly.

The card advised it should take 30 minutes, and I wasn't far off.

Around 45 minutes later we were tucking into tasty pancakes, which were so filling it was impossible to finish two - despite my husband's fears that a meal isn't complete without meat!

The tomatoes were juicy and delicious, with so much more flavour than those bought in a supermarket, and I was pretty impressed that I had made my own salad dressing.

Meal number two consisted of potato and spinach fritters with apple and kohlrabi remoulade and chutney, below. Having never eaten kohlrabi I was intrigued as to what it would taste like.

This meal did take quite a bit longer to prepare than the advised 35 minutes, but it was worth it.

Again, it was so filling and tasty, and I couldn't quite believe I had managed to pull it off without any disasters.

The kohlrabi was crunchy and mild, a perfect accompaniment in the remoulade with the apple and creme fraiche.

My only slight confusion was that a whole nutmeg was included in the list of ingredients, but it didn't feature anywhere in the recipe instructions, so I left it to one side rather than ruin the dish by trying to include it in the wrong place.

The final meal was warm beet and carrot salad with mint, sheep's cheese and rhubarb, below.

There were quite a few trays, pots and pans needed for this, leaving rather a lot of washing up at the end, but the actual cooking was quite straightforward.

There was only one small part that went wrong - I was meant to use the juice from cooking the rhubarb in sugar and orange as a dressing, but I must have left it too long after taking it out of the oven and it became sticky and hard.

But it was far from a disaster, and I simply improvised, creating a slightly different dressing using the leftover ingredients.

I felt such an achievement at the end of the three nights having cooked three tasty meals, and it was a bonus knowing that they were all fresh and organic.

And now I have the recipes to use in the future if I want to try them again! 

To find out more about Riverford's range of recipe boxes, log on to riverford.co.uk.