January 2016 Plated Dinner Subscription Box Review + Free Meals Coupon

For 2016 Plated’s look has gotten a refresh, but is still sending the same great meals!  Plated sends weekly dinner kits with high quality ingredients and chef-created recipes. Each week you’ll choose from a variety of quick gourmet meals 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.

Important to note: whereas Plated has been a subscription, you could previously turn off auto-shipments. You can no longer do that. No big deal for us, because we like to go in and select what recipes we’re receiving anyways.

The jute packaging is back again. We’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.

This week’s email was once again pretty bare and did not include information about our meals, but does include what you need from home. There’s now no reminder of the ease of preparation and all the other subscriptions provide some version of that. We think the recipe cards should include it anyways, but at the very least the email should let you know which is easiest. The link to our box details only showed the current recipes, so it was unhelpful. You can get the recipe PDFs in your account but not the difficulty.

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] We have also started ordering Home Chef ($30 off with link). We love all of these boxes – try them out and pick your favorite.

Plated has new branding – but we were super disappointed that they didn’t put the ease of preparation on the recipe card.  They could put it right there where it says serves 2 people – because all of Plated’s meals serve two people!

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.

All the food comes bagged up and separated (mostly) into the recipes.

Turkey Burger Lettuce Wraps with Sriracha Aioli and Crispy Green Beans. 30-40 mins, 720 calories.

This is similar to a recipe from last year that incorporated pork and Kimchi.  Plated will occasionally update favorite recipes from the past, adding some new twists.   We liked both versions of this dish very much.  The current version used turkey, which had a very light flavor.  I liked the very simple preparation for this dish — the green bean side was the more complicated portion of the dish.  The coating cooked off of the green beans, what was left remaining as crispy bits clinging to the ends of the beans.   It was very tasty, but I’m not sure if the result on the beans was as intended (though our result looked a lot like that pictured on the recipe card, so perhaps we nailed it).

Chicken Pad Thai with Bok Choy, Carrots, and Bean Sprouts. 25-35 minutes, 770 calories.

Pad Thai is a really interesting dish to make, since everyone’s version differs so much.  This version used gochujang as a stand in for the fish sauce and peppers, and it incorporated peanut butter, egg, and bok choy.  This was tasty and moderately simple to prepare.  The peanut butter was a little more powerful than I would have preferred, and there were three large, hard seeds within our tamarind paste (making up the majority of the dollop) that I didn’t discover until serving.  These could have been a real toothache.  This dish made a ton of food, easily four big servings worth.

Almond Butter Cookies with Dark and White Chocolate. 25-35 mins, 310 calories.

These cookies were quick and incredibly easy to make.  I like the way Plated used an unconventional recipe, using almond butter as the base of the dough and omitting the flour altogether.  In fact, it is so unconventional that I spent a couple minutes searching for the flour I must have misplaced before checking the recipe card to discover there was none.  The cookies didn’t wow me, but the almond butter did give them a rich and hearty taste that paired well with the chocolate chunks.  Although the salted sweets movement is a bit overdone, this particular cookie was served very well by a pinch of Maldon salt.

I’m enjoying the new Plated interface and like that I have direct access to a Plated “concierge” when I want to change my order for the week (for example, to add double of one dish, or an extra dish than my subscription). We have certainly been using this feature.

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).