February 2016 Plated Subscription Box Review + Coupon

This week, Plated had a couple wicked game day type food selections, and we had to try them.  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, seafood, 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. You can skip at the click of a button.

The jute packaging is here again!

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.

All of Plated’s meals serve two people, though we usually scale down our portions at dinner and have some left for lunch.  A weekly email lets us know what we need from home (usually to make sure you have an egg or olive oil on hand — nothing major).  You can get the recipe PDFs in your account but not the difficulty (if we remember to grab the information before the end of the week we can get it from the weekly menu, but only there, and it’s inaccessible after Sunday).  We think that the recipe cards should include a notation regarding the ease of preparation — this is something all the other major meal prep boxes do, but at the very least the email should let you know which is easiest.  The email has a link to our box details, but it only shows the current recipes, so it isn’t helpful in this respect.

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 – they’ve reformatted the look of the recipe cards, but still no ease of preparation notation.  Sometimes you can guess by the estimated prep time (or you can read the whole recipe through, of course), but I like to know at a glance what to avoid if I’m not feeling like Julienning or sealing dumplings for twenty minutes that day.

Plated’s recipes rely on mise en place and then cook; 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.
 

White Pizza with Buffalo Chicken and Yogurt Ranch Dressing

Difficulty medium

Time 30-40 Minutes

Calories 630 per serving

This dish was absolutely killer.  The buffalo chicken, blue cheese, and ranch flavor was spot on — it tasted like buffalo chicken and not a pizza topping interpretation of it.  I did split the dough into two pies, and I rolled it thin (one of the pies is pictured above).  The only minor annoyance with this dish was that the mozzarella and blue cheese came mixed in a single container, so I had to pick it apart to create a pizza with a blue cheese-free zone for Brandy.

Philly-Style Cheesesteaks with Onion, Mushrooms, and Peppers

Difficulty medium

Time 35-45 Minutes

Calories 720 per serving

Another great-tasting dish.  This one was loaded with sautéed onions and peppers, and blanketed with provolone cheese.  Cheese steak is hard to replicate from scratch unless you have a rotary cutter to shave the meat — cutting thinly cross-grain is harder on a small steak (itself already cut cross-grain) than it is on a round.  Still, the meat was sufficiently tender, and it had great flavor.  The bread was also great.  This was a super-easy dish — as long as you don’t get hung up on the slicing.

Classic Blondie with Chocolate Chips

Difficulty easy

Time 30-40 Minutes

Calories 410 per serving

We were only in the market for a couple meals this week, so we decided to grab a dessert to round out the box.  The blondies had great ingredients (we know from sampling the chips as we made them), but the cooking time was too long.  Our oven is a bit slow, if off-temp at all, yet the cookies were deeply browned two minutes before the lower end of the suggested time range.  The box came with the pan in which to cook them, so the recipe should have anticipated the thinness of the dough in the pan, and resulting fast cooking time.  I suspect the recipe was converted from a two-ramekin recipe without adjusting cook time.  Had I not checked them early, they would have burnt — we managed to get toasty, but decent blondies out of it. These were gone in 20 minutes after we sliced them.

Amazing week from Plated!  Brandy is the pickier eater but has been choosing a Plated box pretty much every week these days, so their current recipes have been a little more accessible to at least her palate. Do you get Plated? What did you make this week?

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).