I made this kit – my first from Blue Apron – for my vegan daughter. Overall she thought it was OK, but wasn’t overly pleased by it. She feels she can make tastier food by herself (and she’s 16!).
The recipe was fairly straightforward and quick to prepare. The lime wasn’t at all necessary as the curry was sour enough. I appreciated that the aromatics (garlic, ginger, onions, etc.) already came all mushed up so I didn’t have to peel & chop them. I do think that this rice could have benefited from a starch, rice in particular. I can’t say much more about it, other than the portion was sufficient for two meals (though that might have been because she didn’t really like it).
I paid ~$12 for this kit, using a special offer. I think it was worth it at this price, but I’m not sure it would have been at $20.
Eating out – or getting take out – with a vegan is no easy matter, at least here in San Leandro (L.A., though, is another matter altogether). So I’m starting to ask restaurants what vegan dishes they offer previous to taking my daughter to the restaurant.
These four dishes are always vegan at Favorite Indian, Hayward. I’m sure that’s true too at the other branches, but you may want to confirm.
Vegetable Pakora, veggies coated with seasoned chickpea flour and fried.
Dal Curry, a yellow lentil curry. I tried this at the buffet, and it was pretty good.
Aloo Gobi, potatoes and cauliflower cooked with spices.
Bhindi Masala, okra cooked with spices and onions.
Chana Masala, chick peas cooked with spices. Alas, my daughter is not too fond of this.
In addition, Favorite India can make the following dishes vegan. Simply ask them to make them with no cream when you order them:
Baingan Bharta
Eggplant roasted in tadoor and cooked in a cream and tomato sauce
Navratam Korma
Vegetables, nuts &
cheese cooked in a mild sauce (asked them to hold both the cream and
the cheese/paneer)
Mushroom Matar
Mushroom & green
peas cooked with onion & tomatoes
Dal Makhani
Whole black lentil & red kidney beans cooked in a creamy sauce.
They may have other vegan dishes at their buffet, so it doesn’t help to ask. The restaurant manager/owner – the young woman who is often at the reception desk – is very knowledgeable as to the ingredients.
(Unfortunately, Plated has ended its subscription service and kits are no longer available at my Safeway).
My first experience with meal kits was a Plated kit that I bought at Safeway on a whim. I was impressed enough with it that it threw me into this project of trying different meal kit services – and taking advantage of the deals most offer when you subscribe. As it turns out, Plated is one of the more upscale meal kit services, offering more global and sophisticated meals at a premium price.
Overall, I liked Plated, but if I was going to pay full price for it, I’d just order the kits from Safeway delivery so as to minimize the packaging waste and make delivery more efficient. (Note, my Safeway now only carries a single Plated kit, but it’s often discounted to about $15)
The Plans
Plated offers kits for 2, 3 or 4 people. You can order 2, 3 or 4 kits per week. The cost per serving is $10 orders if you order kits for 3 or more people, or $12 if you order a kit for just 2. The typical box with 3 kits for 2 people each, costs $72/week. Shipping is free for orders over $60, and $8 for those below.
As mentioned above, you can also buy Plated kits at some Safeway supermarkets and other supermarkets owned by Albertsons – you can check here whether any is near where you live. At the supermarket you can only find kits for 2 servings and these cost between $20 and $24, depending on the specific meal.
Like other companies, Plated provides incentives to sign in. Right now they are offering 25% off your first 4 boxes. After cancelling, I’ve received offers from Plated to resubscribe for 40% off on my first box.
The Food
Plated has probably the largest selection of meal kits in the industry. They offer 20 choices per week! They do repeat many meals from week to week, however. Unlike other services, they don’t have “premium” meals – but they also don’t have premium ingredients such as fillet mignon or large scallops. Note that only up to 4-6 meal kits are offered at the supermarket.
Of all the services out there, Plated probably offers the most “international food” choices, including some from lesser known cuisines (e.g. Indonesian Beef Rendang, Hungarian Meatballs). I can imagine this would be particularly attractive for people who don’t live in areas with many ethnic restaurants. I also appreciate that Plated offers many “fusion” dishes (e.g. curried lamb tacos, spanakopita grilled cheese sandwiches), that push beyond what most of its users are likely to have tried before. I cook a lot of international food, but a big advantage of using Plated’s meal kits is that they do away with the need to hunt for specialized ingredients and then have to buy them in far greater quantities that what you need for the recipe you are making.
Plated offers varied recipes vis a vis ingredients as well. They have four vegetarian offerings weekly and three seafood dishes. They don’t cater to any specific diet, however, and they seldom offer vegan meals.
Ingredients seem to be fresh and of good quality, but I’ve had some problems, such as having steaks sent of very different thickness.
The Shipping and Delivery
I was able to get my meals on a Tuesday. The day before they sent me an e-mail reminding me my delivery would be the next day and giving me the tracking number. They can deliver as late as 8 PM, though I got mine during the day. My order was fine.
The Packaging
Plated kits came in a cardboard box, just like the other services. Inside it I found the recipes for the meals and, after lifting the liner, the ingredients. Meats were packed between freezer packs at the bottom of the box. Heavy ingredients were in plastic bags, organized by recipe. On top of them were lighter, more fragile ingredients (leaf vegetables).
The cardboard box can be recycled, but the rest of the ingredients can’t.
Plated supermarket kits come in a large plastic box, which an theoretically be recycled. Most of the ingredients are in their own plastic bags. There is a lot of packaging waste, but it’s hard to say whether it’s more than what you usually get at the supermarket.
The Results
I’ve cooked several meal kits, as well as a couple of other Plated recipes using my own ingredients.
In all, I’m a bit conflicted about Plated. I love their choice and their international and fusion offerings. I don’t love the price and the food has not awed me. I plan to continue getting the occasional kit from the supermarket, but I probably wouldn’t surprise without a great offer.
I got my two weeks of Plated using a Black Friday coupon that saved me $40 out of my first two boxes. That means I paid $8 per 2-serving kit I got. I paid full price for the one I bought at the supermarket. I later got more weeks at 40% off one box.
I will confess that I ordered this dish because I was curious about the fig compote – this is not something you see often. And, of course, pork goes very well with fruit.
The compote didn’t disappoint, it was very tasty, and it went great with the pork. Alas, there was too much compote for the pork – not that that was a big deal.
I’m not a huge fan of pork chops, but this one was quite nice. I also liked the multi-colored potatoes. All around a good meal.
I am impossibly backed up with all the meal kit reviews I need to review, but I can’t help but start with the one I made tonight: Plated‘s Seared Steak with Blue Cheese Butter and Spinach-Beet Salad. It was absolutely delicious – and a very quick recipe to make to boot.
I’m amazed at the simplicity of it: fresh baby spinach tossed with olive oil and salt and topped with beef sirloin slices, toasted pecans, blue cheese butter (a mixture of just blue cheese and butter) and a packet of balsamic glaze. There were also supposed to be seared sliced beets, but no one in my family likes beets so I skipped them (I’m thinking of using them to make an amuse bouche for my Christmas Eve dinner).
But all the flavors together – including the juice from the beef – were just magical. They worked to contrast and compliment each other. I definitely have to make this myself, though that means making my own balsamic glaze, which is easy, but time consuming. If I find commercial balsamic glaze, I may even make this very simple salad for Xmas Even dinner.
The meal wasn’t perfect, however. While most of the spinach was nice and crispy, some of the leaves had started to wilt. Given that I only received my box yesterday, I’m not sure the spinach would have survived if I’d taken longer to make this kit.
Another problem was that the two steaks were terribly different in thickness – one was twice as think as the other, which made cooking them at the same time difficult. This is not the first time I’ve encountered this problem and I wish meal kit companies would be better at this. The beef, however, was very good quality and very tasty.
Finally, I don’t think the portion was large enough for an adult. Perhaps it would have been if I had included the beets, but I’ve found that many of the meal kits that don’t include a carb leave me hungry.
I paid $8 for this kit for 2 people, using a $40-off Black Friday promo.
I had not heard of Cedarlane before I found this refrigerated Cheese Tortellini meal at Grocery Outlet. It turns out that Cedarlane is a 40-year old company that sells frozen and refrigerated food. I couldn’t find this exact item in their website, but they do show several intriguing vegan meals I’ll try to find (they apparently sell this brand at Lucky Supermarkets).
This tray meal of tortellini in tomato sauce was basic but tasty. I liked how soft the tortellini were. There are three servings in this meal, but I can’t imagine that it would satisfy more than one as a full meal.
It was $5 at Grocery Outlet, so I imagine it costs significantly more at the supermarket. At $5 is a good meal, I’m not sure I’d pay any more than that.
Home Chef is a middle priced meal kit service furnishing easy-to-cook meals catering to all-American tastes. It’s a solid choice for people who want to get something tasty and not overly complicated on the table. It’s reasonably priced and some of the dishes are very good.
I have now tried Home Chef at least three times, and I’ve enjoyed it while I’ve had it. However, the meals are pretty boring all in all. It’s best for easy-to-make meals at a reasonable price. The Plans
Home Chef offers quite a lot of flexibility with their plans. They have kits for 2, 4, 6 or 8 people and you can get from 2 to 6 meals a week. Most meals cost $10 per serving (or $20 per kit), with more premium offerings from $12-16 a serving (and occasionally more). In most cases you can substitute the protein in your kits for an additional cost – needless to say, the default proteins are usually the cheapest.
Meals costs around $10-$13 per person per meal (so 3 meal kits for 2 a week will cost you $60-78), with some more expensive premium offerings. Shipping is now free, but there is a minimum order of $49.95. Home Chef also offers entree salads for around $7, as well as extra proteins for a price.
Home Chef is now selling their kits at some Kroeger supermarkets.
Like other services, Home Chef provides incentives for signing up. Use this link to save $35 off your first box – if I’m subscribed when you order, I might get a credit towards an order. Note that there may be better offers out there.
The Food
Home Chef offers up to 15 meal kit choices weekly, including at least 3 vegetarian options. They don’t offer vegan options – unless the vegetarian kits just happen to be vegan. They don’t cater to any specific diet either.
The meals tend to be slightly upscale versions of basic modern American food. They include burgers, pastas, rice bowls, tostadas, flatbreads and baked chicken/salmon/pork chops with vegetable & starchy sides. Few of their recipes have exotic ingredients.
Home Chef is now offering the ability of slightly customizing some recipes by substituting the protein with another choice (for example, getting ground pork instead of beef strips or ground turkey, or getting a smaller amount of antibiotic-free chicken instead of regular chicken). This should give some flexibility to people who simply don’t like some proteins. Note that protein change often incurs an additional charge.
Premium meals, which might include steak, shrimp or other more expensive ingredients, are offered at a higher price.
In addition to traditional meal kits, which include raw ingredients that you cook and combine – Home Chef is now offering kits that include a mixture of raw and prepared ingredients and are easy to put together, many of these are just items you put into an included baking tray and then put in the oven.
The quality of the ingredients I got was pretty good, but Home Chef does not specialize in sending organic ingredients.
While I enjoyed the meals I got from Home Chef, it’s not my choice for a long term service because the choices just don’t seem very exciting to me. Plus as most of their meals don’t usually require exotic ingredients, I can make them at home using my ingredients for less.
The Shipping & Delivery
Home Chef scheduled meals to be delivered at my house on Tuesdays. They can arrive between 8 AM and 9 PM, so you are better off not planning to cook them that night. Personally, I prefer kits that arrive on Monday to give me more flexibility as when I cook them during the week – I don’t like to get to the weekend and feel rushed to cook a meal kit before it goes bad.
The Packaging
Home Chef sends its kits in a standard cardboard box. They have two varieties of liner, one made from PET foam that apparently can be put in the recyclables bin, and the other made of recycled cotton which has to be thrown in the garbage. The ice packs are made from water and salt, and you can throw them in the garbage or open them, put them in some container to evaporate, and then throw the waste in the garbage.
Most of the ingredients for the meals come in zippered plastic bags (though beware that the zippers break easily). The meats, however, are between freezer packs. This is a handy way of keeping all ingredients together – though it does mean either refrigerating them all, or taking the ones that don’t need refrigerator out of the bags.
The oven trays Home Chef uses are recyclable
With your first order, Home Chef sends you a folder and recipe cards come pre-perforated so that you can keep them in it.
This was more like baked chicken with mashed potatoes, mushrooms and wine sauce, but tasty enough
All in all, I’ve been with the service. Cancelling was very easy and quick, it’s done online. Home Chef preserves your account, so that it’s easy to resubscribe again. Home Chef’s offers some incentives to resubscribe. Twice they e-mailed me giving me a $10 credit – which they seem to be adding to the $10 credit I already had (which has not gone away!). More recently, they offered me the same deal they are offering new subscribers: $20 off per week for four weeks. Alas, when I looked at their menu I didn’t find much that excited me, so I decided to re-subscribe to HelloFresh and alternating it with Blue Apron for a month or so. I will make more Home Chef recipes to get a better feel for the service, however.
I didn’t get any meal kits this week, so I decided to hack a Home Chef recipe for dinner. I wanted something with chicken, as I’m trying to eat less beef, and this one seemed simple enough. I love coq au vin (which I haven’t made in a while). and while, obviously, you can’t make coq au vin in an hour, I was willing to give this recipe for Coq au Vin with Bone-In Chicken & Mashed Potatoes a try.
Alas, once I started making it, I realized there wasn’t much to it: you make mashed potatoes, you sear and then bake the chicken, you sautee the mushrooms and pearl onions, you make the 2-two ingredient sauce and voila!
The results were good, but not great – though that may be because I actually used chicken breasts instead of the thighs I prefer and because I didn’t make enough sauce for the massive breasts I got (lord, that sounds dirty!).
The sauce, which was tasty enough, consisted of 2 tsp of chicken demi-glace dissolved in 5 oz of red wine. I used beef demi-glace, as I didn’t have the regular kind.
I also didn’t use pearl onions because Safeway failed to deliver them to me.
In all, I spent $20 to make this meal, which actually fed 3 of us with leftovers (those were really big chicken breasts) – so about 1/3 less of what the meal kit would have cost.
I also went out of my way to look for “antibiotic-free” chicken, only to find out that California passed a law to ban the use of growth-promotion antibiotics in chickens. Antibiotics can only be used if a veterinarian prescribes them to cure a specific ailment. So it would seem that any “antibotic-free” designation on chicken raised in CA is just for advertising purposes. I had wanted to see if antibiotic-free chicken tasted better than regular chicken, and obviously I found out it didn’t.
I did find out, though, that searing the chicken skin-side-down for a couple of minutes and then baking it at 400F, leaves you with a very nice crispy chicken skin.
Tacos & fajitas seem to be one of the most common meals offered by meal kit companies. I’ve ordered them a few times, simply because I didn’t see anything else they offered that we might like, but it’s not a top choice for me. I can get three ready-made tacos of a similar size at the Mexican Restaurant in the corner for $13, and I don’t have to spend the time cooking them. Or, of course, I can make them myself for a few dollars.
Still, some of the taco recipes I’ve made have been good and I’m always up for a discovery. This recipe for carne asada fajitas with pickled onions and lime cream, however, did not produce one. The tacos/fajitas were pretty straightforward and just OK flavor wise – indeed, they might have been better without the southwestern flavoring.
They were fairly easy and quick to make and at $13 for a meal for six tacos, they were pretty cheap.
I got this kit for free, with a special one-time code that someone gave me. The regular cost for the two serving kit is $13, including shipping. Use this link to get $20 off your first box.
I didnt manage to take my own photo when I made these.
Rating: 7/10
Sometimes a meal kit fails you, and sometimes you fail a meal kit. This time I think both of us failed each other. I think this could have been a pretty good meal kit if I’d had all of the ingredients, and if I had been more careful while putting it together. As things were, my husband got a decent sandwich – but not really a sloppy joe – and I got to eat the remaining filling with a spoon. At least it was pretty tasty.
This EveryPlate kit consists of ground pork which is supposed to be cooked with BBQ sauce and ketchup, potato buns, an onion to quickly pickle and sweet potatoes to bake. One of the two packets of BBQ sauce my kit came with was open, so I had to toss it away. Unfortunately, when I went to make the pork, I realized I didn’t have any more BBQ sauce at home. Even worse, the kit called for using my own ketchup – and I was also out of it. At the end, I was only able to cook the ground pork in a the single packet of BBQ sauce. Amazingly, this still gave a very nice flavor to the pork.
I didn’t try the pickled onions, but my husband raved about them. I’m thus including the recipe below.
As for the buns, I burnt my first two when I put them in the toaster – and then dropped them (thus my lack of a sandwich myself). I also managed to burn the sweet potatoes. Indeed, one of the things that did not work with this kit is that the sweet potatoes require that you preheat the oven (something which takes at least 15-20 minutes) and then you cook them for 20-25 minutes. The rest of the meal takes a very short time to make. So we were ready to eat far before the sweet potatoes were ready – which is why I forgot about them.
I got this kit for free, with a special one-time code that someone gave me. The regular cost for the two serving kit is $13, including shipping. Use this link to get $20 off your first box.
Quick Pickled Onions
1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
1/4 tsp sugar
juice from one lime
pinch of salt
Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Let to pickle for at least 10 minutes.
Sloppy Joes
drizzle of oil
1 red onion, chopped
salt & pepper to taste
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb ground pork
1/3 cup BBQ sauce
1/4 cup Ketchup
1/3 cup water
1 tsp lime juice
Heat oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion, season with salt & pepper, and fry, stirring frequently, until soft – 4-5 minutes. Add the minced garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the ground pork and cook, stirring and separating, until browned, about 4-5 minutes. Add the bbq sauce, ketchup, water and lime juice. Cook, stirring frequently, until it thickens. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve in burger buns topped with the pickled onions.
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