Plated Thanksgiving Holiday Review & Free Plates Coupon

It’s a Plated Thanksgiving! Plated sends weekly dinner kits with high quality ingredients and chef-created recipes. Each week you’ll choose from a variety of dishes that range from meats, chicken, seafoods, and purely vegetarian options. There’s enough selection to please all palates, and the recipes are seasonally focused. We love the way each meal incorporates only a couple key herbs or spices; the flavors shine through, and the recipes remain easy to follow. We love getting boxes most week to try new recipes, and we save the must make again recipes – although they’re also available in your account. Plated’s recipes rely on mise en place and then cook, and to be honest, we often mix up the steps from how the recipe is written, but we’re both experienced cooks and know what can be accomplished while something else cooks. So, read your cards if you need the step by steps.

 The recipe card was updated earlier this year, though we wish it would indicate the ease of preparation on the card so we can decide what we’re making first without looking it up. When your box is sent out you’ll get an email indicating the pantry items you’ll need (this week:black pepper egg egg yolk kosher salt olive oil ), plus a reminder of what meals are coming, preparation ease, cook time, and calorie count.  We get asked a lot – Sometimes we order Plated and sometimes Hello Fresh. It just depends on what meals we’re interested in. [Hello Fresh: Take $40 off your first box with coupon code 7UT7K8]

The jute packaging is back!  I’ve determined that there is no real rhyme or reason to the choice of outer packaging, as it changes monthly.  No herbs this time, so I don’t know if they still pack them in an envelope to protect them from the ice. Boxes are always packed with the meat on the bottom, underneath a few big ice packs — the rest of the food is set on top with more ice.

We had selected a couple great vegetarian dishes for our dinner, so we cooked a turkey breast to go with our feast.

Pumpkin Baked “Ziti” with Sage. 30-40 mins, 660 cal. Easy.

This dish was warm, hearty, and full of pumpkin goodness.  The pumpkin was great as a savory feature ingredient when paired with sage and shallot.

The pasta was Sfoglini Pasta, made in Brooklyn; the Zucca shape held up well to baking and was excellent at holding little pockets of yummy sauce!

 
Grilled Cheese with Roasted Green Beans and Cranberry Compote. 25-30 mins, 840 cal. Easy.

The mild cheddar and delicious bread made a superb meal for the kids.  They loved the melty sandwiches — our kids are fairly young, so Mom and Dad got to have a few bites, too.   The Cranberry was prepared like a mulled pepper jelly.  The recipe made a good portion of it, and we used it on our other leftovers the next day.

The secret to the great browning of the crust was a little bit of mayo and cooking under a weighted object (I never seem to run out of uses for that paella pan!).

I liked the toasted pumpkin seeds a whole lot, but the teen means were difficult to get just right using roasting as the cooking technique.  The pumpkin seeds were a little overdone, due to my placing the baking sheet on top of a hot burner.  They still were delicious!

Pumpkin Cheesecake with Whipped Cream. 30-40 mins, 580 cal. Easy.  The desserts were delightfully simple to make.  The items shown above are for the pumpkin cheesecake and whipped cream.

As if cheesecake itself weren’t sufficiently decadent — We also had a big pile of buttery whipped cream to pile on it (the recipe made another big scoop beyond that shown, but I thought you might want to see some of the pie)!

Pecan Pie Bars. 20-30 mins, 530 cal. Medium.

Pecan pie is my favorite dessert of the season, and this dessert hits all the right notes.

The caramel was out of control!

The pie crust wasn’t magical, but it served as a nice base for balancing the heaps of caramel and pecans.

We love having Plated to make our mealtime simpler and more delicious.  We were glad to see that they had meals perfect for our holiday feast.  We were able to do a whole meal for our small family in a fraction of the time we would have spent doing the usual dinner, and the cleanup was much easier, too.

Visit Plated to find or more or to subscribe. Currently you can get 2 free plates when you buy 4 when you sign up with this link (no coupon code required).