Plated Meals Week January 7th and Promo Code 2 Free Meals!

My first Plated meals arrived! Plated is a service similar to Hello Fresh, where you pick certain menu items each week and they send the fresh proportioned, ingredients to your door. All you need are a few staples like pepper, salt, and oil and you can make the meals within 30 minutes. I had another discount code for this, and since Hello Fresh doesn't deliver to my area, I tried Plated. For this week's meals, I decided on:

Everything comes packed up in a big box, packed with your ingredients and kept cold with a big ice pack and kept in a foil cold bag. Everything gets shipped on Mondays, arrives on Tuesday, through FedEx. Mine came at 1PM, so it came in plenty time for dinner.

Here's how everything is packaged. Meat is vacuum packed, herbs are in bags, and all the rest is separately packaged in 1 bag labeled with the meal it's for.

You also get these big recipe cards with some tips, a great photo of the end result, along with servings, time it takes, and calories per serving.

The back of the recipe cards have the ingredients, items you need from home, directions with photos as well. I found it really helpful to have the photos for each step in the directions.

Here were all the ingredients for the Thai-Style Pork Salad with Papaya and Mint. Pork loin, cilantro and mint, fish sauce, Thai chile, shallot, garlic clove (already peeled! Loved that) mung bean sprouts, jasmine rice, limes, brown sugar, and papaya (not pictured).

It turned out great! I have never been more pleasantly surprised by how good a dish was. I don't think I've ever had papaya, but it has the texture and taste of a mango kind of. I know that Plated tries to make menu items that are "in season" because eating fruits and vegetables that are in season are much better tasting than ones that are not that are trucked in from usually Mexico. I cannot stress enough how delicious this dish was. I highly recommend you try to replicate this with the recipe I included above.

I'd also like to say I will be making this again now that I have the recipe. There was probably enough food to serve 3, instead of 2, but it was so good we didn't want to share. The only small hiccups I had cooking this was it took more than 20-30 minutes, but that usually happens to me, and I seared the pork, but it wasn't done in the middle so I sliced it and seared the pieces as well. Just a few minutes, to get it to just barely cook through, but also still be juicy and not tough. I was also trying to dirty less pans, which I managed to cut dirty pans in half. And we only really have 2 usable burners so, cooking the shallots, pork and rice on the stove at once would have been difficult.

One tiny gripe I had with the recipes is that they include some of the bigger kitchen items you need, but fail to mention small things like bowls, graters, and the like. If say a college student or just someone who doesn't have a fully stocked kitchen is trying to make this, looks at the items and says "yeah I have all of that" then attempts to make it and doesn't have a grater, that would suck. It should have a list of everything the chef used to make the dish, not just the pans.

Here's how the Steak Fajitas with Guacamole turned out! It was really good, except the tortillas were really bland. No flavor whatsoever. Wish I had scrapped them and used better ones. We have really terrible lighting in our kitchen so sorry for the weird colors, I tried correcting it a little but it still has a weird tinge.


If you would like to try Plated 50% off and get 2 meals for free, only $30 for 4 meals, just click the link, the discount will automatically be applied when you order. Or you can enter 92fc3a at checkout as well.

Have you ever tried a service like Plated or Hello Fresh before? What did you think of the service? What have been some of your favorite recipes? Let me know in the comments!

For all Plated reviews click here.




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