Plated May 2017 Subscription Box Review + Coupon

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Plated is a weekly dinner kit subscription box 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. You can swap out your recipes and skip any week you don’t want.

Plated ships fresh ingredients and complete instructions right to your door. The food arrives protected within insulating padding made of recycled thread material.

Boxes are always packed with the meat on the bottom with a several big ice packs – the rest of the food is set on top on a cardboard barrier. Gladly, they’ve shifted to putting all of the ice in the lower compartment – this has eliminated the minor damage the tomatoes and leafy greens used to suffer from direct contact with the ice.

Plated sends a weekly email – it doesn’t tell you much about your meals, other than what you need from home. They now offer three-serving meals! This is a great option for guaranteeing leftovers for a tasty and easy lunch!

DEAL: Currently you can get 2 free plates when you buy 4 when you sign up with this link (no coupon code required).

On-card information is streamlined and includes only prep-time, number of servings and calorie count. Most of Plated’s meals serve two people. Unless stated otherwise, our pics of finished dishes show a single serving.

Plated’s recipes rely on mise en place, prepping everything before cooking. This works well, but we always read ahead – you can save time and cutting board space by shifting some steps around, like prepping garnish later while something bakes, instead of at the beginning. The recipes are easy to follow, with ingredients printed in bold and tips to avoid common pitfalls.

All the food comes bagged up and separated (mostly) into the recipes – meat and some large or delicate items are bagged separately. The recipe cards tell you anything you need from home – usually just cookware, salt and pepper, and some olive oil – occasionally you’ll need an egg.

Brown Butter Orecchiette With Spicy Sausage And Peas. 20-30 minutes, easy, 840 calories per serving.

This dish is a subscriber favorite, and it certainly is one of our favorites, too. Al dente pasta is joined by spicy sausage in a silky and creamy sauce. The meal is very quick and easy (and nearly a one-pot meal), another reason it is one of our faves. This picture captures both portions, and it is actually more food than it appears to be.

The sauce is really just the early stages of a brown butter roux, with the pasta water used as the starch and finished with Parmesan cheese. We love the range of textures in this dish!

Carne Asada Burgers With Avocado And Yucca Fries. 40-50 minutes, medium, 860 calories per serving.

The burger itself is thick and very simply seasoned and covered with jack cheese, but char-roasted tomato and onion and creamy lime-doused avocado give it a Tex-Mex feel. Yucca fries sprinkled with spicy seasoning are a perfect, theme-appropriate stand in for steak fries. This was a very simple dish to make – even the yucca was par-cooked to simplify prep. I’m a fan of yucca, so I was very pleased with the crispy and creamy fries (and loved the garlic aioli), and the burger was very nice. I didn’t find the toppings to be magical, but they were very good.

Crispy Chicken With Roasted Poblano Salsa And Yellow Rice. 35-45 minutes, medium, 740 calories per serving.

This was a great dish! The components were nice – lovely seasoned rice, smoky roasted salsa, and crispy fried chicken.  Together, it was a wonderful combo of flavor and texture, and it had a nice protein/veg/starch balance, too. The only thing we were disappointed in was the chicken itself. While the coating was perfect (and relatively easy to make), the chicken was extremely firm, both raw and cooked. I’ve noticed this quality in Home Chef’s chicken, too, but this is the first I’ve experienced it in a Plated meal. The unusual density may be a result of a leaner diet, more active chicken – I don’t know.

Plated offers some of our favorite meals, and we love to get dishes we know we love along with some new-to-us meals. This set of meals comprised one of our all-time favorites, plus a couple newcomers with nice flavor combos.
What do you think of Plated?

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