Hellobee

I am going to get straight to the point here. I don’t enjoy cooking.

I have plenty of family members and friends who love cooking. And I respect that. To them, spending time in the kitchen after work is relaxing and they find some cool zen in the experience. I’ve tried in my past to hop on the cooking bandwagon, but I’ve just found that it doesn’t bring me the same kind of joy and relaxation that it does for others. I used to feel somewhat bad about this fact, especially once the girls were born and I felt all the intense mom expectations start to build, but now I really honestly don’t. Life is just too short in my opinion to spend lots of time doing things that I have limited interest in doing.

Now all that said, I obviously need to eat. And my kids and husband need to eat. And I would prefer for all of us to eat nutritiously and for it to be a somewhat enjoyable meal (read: tasty and palatable for both toddlers and adults). Also, quick (no explanation necessary, I think).

All this brings me to a review of a meal prep kit, Plated. I received a credit for a free week of the Plated meal service and I signed up in early July. I had tried Blue Apron a few years ago and I really liked it. I have generally found that these meal prep services really take the stress and hassle out of meal planning and grocery shopping, and allow you to learn a few cooking tricks and ultimately turn out some yummy meals. So needless to say, I was excited to give Plated a try!

I signed up for a two-servings meal kit to cover three meals in one week. Here is my honest take:

Ease and variety of choosing meals. It was extremely easy and convenient for me to pick out meals that I wanted to make. There were plenty of options presented on the site, and I honestly had a difficult time narrowing it down to just three selections. I liked that you could filter things via type of protein (fish, poultry, beef, vegetarian, etc) and lots of the recipes sounded delicious to me. It also was easy and quick to find a delivery time that worked well for our schedule. Compared to my experience with Blue Apron years ago, I found that the selection on Plated was far superior.

Delivery and unpacking the box. We were traveling home from a July 4^th vacation on the day that the Plated box was set to arrive. I’m not sure how long the box was sitting outside in the Chicago heat by the time I retrieved it about 10 PM that night, but I was very pleasantly surprised to open the box and find everything very fresh and cold. It was quick and easy to unpack the box, transfer the items to my fridge, and discard the box and packaging. My only gripe with this part of the process is that one of the freezer gel packs ripped and it dripped some goop on to my kitchen floor. Still, that was pretty easy to wipe up and get on with things.

Ease of prep. Keep in mind here that I do not enjoy cooking but rather view it as a chore. So to me, quick and easy prep is of the utmost importance. I generally found the three recipes that I received to be somewhat quick and easy. Considering that my preference is about 30 seconds of cooking and these took up to 45 minutes, it would be hard for me to give a super high rating here. But I really liked how just about everything was pre-measured for me and required little sophisticated techniques or understanding. It was easy to look over the recipe quickly, dive in to the process, and I never felt confusion or stress that something had gone terribly wrong.

Taste of food. The food was delicious! The first meal that I made was an Old Bay Shrimp Roll with Homemade Potato chips, and that one was my favorites. It truly tasted restaurant-quality to me, and my husband also really loved it. There was some extra shrimp that wouldn’t fit into our rolls and it was nice that I could pass those along to the girls (one of them happily gobbled them up – “I like shimp!”; the other stuck her nose up at it because…toddlers).

Serving size. I found the serving sizes to be very, very generous. I couldn’t believe the size of some of the meals once they were prepared! Two of the three meals that we received yielded four servings for us instead of the stated two. I think one night I messed up by adding the whole can of beans to the recipe when I was only supposed to add a cup, but I even split up the components of one of the meals into two days because it was so much food. If you have younger kids or toddlers, I would think that a family of 3-4 could potentially get by with the 2-servings meal plan.

Cost. I received a credit of $72 for my first Plated box so I was able to try a delivery that covered 2 servings for 3 nights. If I hadn’t had the credit, that would have worked out to $12 per person per meal. In my mind, that’s definitely not cheap, especially when I’m doing all of the cooking work! Here in Chicago, I can grab my favorite chicken pad thai for that price, and with significantly less effort…

Despite my reservations on the price, I would say that my overall experience with Plated was pretty positive. I was impressed with the convenience, variety, taste, and serving sizes. The girls joined in for the meal prep on a couple of the dishes, and I had a fun time cooking with them and I think it’s important for them to see how meals come together.

That said, being a working mom who just doesn’t love cooking, I’m not convinced that I want to spend 45 minutes in the kitchen when I get home from work putting one of these meals together on a regular basis. The girls’ interest level meant that I had toddlers literally hanging off of my pants while trying to get the meal done, and I would just rather spend that time with them reading books or playing.

In the end, I would love to have a Plated or similar meal prep service delivered every couple of months. I managed to spread the three meals that they had packaged for a week across two weeks (interspersed with our go-to meals) and I liked that I didn’t feel pressure to get all of the meals cooked in a 1-week period. It’s my understanding that you can skip as many weeks as you like with Plated, so I think that I will look into doing this for our family again once our summer craziness dies down a little bit.