Plated.com Meal Subscription Service

Pros: Tasty and easy to prepare meals shipped to your front door
Cons: too much plastic packaging, service could get expensive if ordered weekly
Are you a person that dreads planning out a weekly dinner menu?  Do you ever look at your spouse and exchange shrugs about what to eat for dinner?  Then I’m pretty sure that Plated is for you.  Plated is a meal subscription box that sends you all the ingredients and instructions for a tasty dinner.  Plated  recently added the Bay Area to it’s delivery service and I wanted to experience the hype around a meal based subscription box.

Plated meals ship via FedEx and amongst other things, one aspect  I love about this service is their customer service.  They want you to experience the food in the quickest (and freshest) way possible so they have great customer service when it comes to any changes or issues with the delivery.

I enlisted my husband to help cook our first Plated dinner since he is so much more patient with things like recipes.  The meals I ended up choosing for our first box were the Roasted Red Fish and the Korean Tacos.  Plated sends all of the fresh ingredients to you in a cooler packed with ice.  Each ingredient is individually wrapped and there are large recipe cards that come with each plate that give really detailed instructions and pictures.

Our first meal was the Roasted Redfish with Jasmine Rice and Bok Choy.  The husband went through the recipe instructions which were clear and detailed- it took about 35 minutes for the meal to be made.  We cooked the fish and bok choy in the same skillet and used a pot for the rice which meant the clean up was pretty easy.  It ended up being a simple meal to put and we were able to interact with each other and our children while putting the dinner together.  I didn’t feel like the recipe was hard and there was a minimal amount of chopping.  We had never tried bok choy before and I can’t say I was impressed on that particular side dish, but the fish and the rice tasted really good!
The second meal was Korean Tacos with Jasmine Rice and holy cow these were AMAZING!  They had just the right amount of heat and I liked how thin and soft the tortillas were.  Once again there was minimal chopping, the portions were exact and the recipe cards gave clear guidance on how to get the meal made.

If I had to complain about something I think it would be all the plastic packaging.  Hopefully Plated can look into some sort of paper based packaging because all of the plastic baggies and bottles just bums me out.  My husband’s minor complaint was that the lettuce was a bit too fresh, meaning he found some dirt (ha!) on the cabbage.  It wasn’t a big deal though and we washed all the lettuce really well before consuming.
Now that we’ve experienced Plated.com we are eager to try more recipes! Some of the meals are Asian inspired and some have a Mexican theme and I have yet to see one recipe repeated. Each week Plated offers seven different recipes- 4 meat dishes and 3 vegetarian options.   The monthly subscription fee is $10 and each of the dinners are $12 each.  If you pay for an  annual membership the price is $8 a month plus for the membership fee.  If you’ve tried Plated did you love it or hate it?