This meal kit was a mixed bag. The pork milanese was sort of bland and it really needed acidity. The blistered tomatoes just didn’t provide enough of it. It was good with lemon juice, but not extraordinary.
I did like the cheesy mashed potatoes a lot – but what’s not to like about cheesy mashed potatoes?
I think my favorite thing about the kit was getting the eggs in their little container. Plus they were cool eggs. I only had to use one, and it had the darkest yolk I’ve ever seen.
I made this kit for my husband and daughter, and they were both very pleased with it. A burger may seem like a trivial thing to make, but making a new and exciting burger and getting the right amount of fat in the meat – and the right quality meat – is not always easy. Given how expensive burgers have become, even at the regular price of $21 per kit this would have been a good meal, but I got the whole kit for $11 with a promo (make sure to always check on the right hand menu for referral links with promo), which was a super bargain.
BTW, keeping the buns in the oven and then toasting them seems to work very well.
There was nothing complicated about this kit for Chicken, Goat Cheese & Spinach Salad with Shallot-Date Chutney, but I really enjoyed it – despite the fact that by the time I made it I was missing a couple of ingredients (my daughter ate the apple meant for the salad as a snack, for instance).
The date-shallot chutney was a new flavor for me, and I appreciated it. I made the kit almost a week after I got the box, and the ingredients were still fresh. All in all, I was very pleased.
My only complaint is that I think the portion was a bit small (or I was particularly hungry).
I paid around $16 for the kit, or $8 a serving – using a “come back” promo I got in e-mail. It was a good price for the quality of the food.
This kit for Pasta Pomodoro with Steak and balsamic cremini mushrooms made me, once again, question what the whole point about Green Chef is. The beef was OK, the mushrooms were good but nothing extraordinary, and the pasta was bland. Most importantly, the meat wasn’t organic, it was plain sirloin (which must be the most boring cut out there), and there were not exotic ingredients – which makes me wonder why this kit is over $26. It convinced me, more than anything, that Green Chef is not for me.
Still, my husband did love the mushrooms. But these were plain mushrooms cooked on the pan where the beef had been cooked for 5 minutes and then with balsamic vinegar for a couple of more minutes. Easy enough to do on our own.
The key to the dish is the sauce, of course, so I imagine I’ll have to experiment and find one that my daughter might like. Safeway has a pineapple peach salsa that might fit the bill. The cauliflower for these tacos is basically sauteed for 3-4 minutes with green pepper (which she didn’t like so I’ll omit next time), you then add some cubed pineapple, 1/4 cup of water and the al pastor sauce, and put it in a 400F oven for 15 minutes.
This kit also taught me how to make mashed black beans – you put the canned beans in a pot with a little bit of water and a teaspoon of vegetable stock concentrate, cook it for five minutes and then mashed.
The cabbage in the kit was supposed to be mixed with a cilantro aioli, but this wasn’t vegan, so I had to skip it. The cabbage was sort of blah on its own, but it added some crunch to the tacos.
Again, all in all she liked them and she wants me to make them again.
And I will, because I’m certainly not going to pay $26 to make this meal. I paid $10 with a promo, and for that it was a bargain.
I’m getting bored writing reviews of meal kits, but I want to at least finish this project. After trying Green Chef this week, I only have one more meal kit company to try (Marley Spoon), and then I’ll be ready to give my final verdict as to which is the best Meal Kit company. But I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Green Chef. You’ll have to wait until my review of the company to hear why, however.
First, as the cook, I really resented all the needless preparation. The cabbage, pineapple and pickled ginger had already been processed and cut into strips or cubed – and yet I was told to chop them. Why not go all the way and send them chopped? Most annoyingly, the instructions asked that I cut the chicken breasts horizontally into two thin cutlets. That’s the sort of task that requires sharp knives and knife skills. I did a fairly good job of it, but it shouldn’t be left to the home cook to do this preparation.
I did enjoy the chicken, however. The chicken cutlets were dipped in tonkatsu sauce, breaded with panko crumbs, sauteed on both sides for 3 minutes and then cooked in the oven for 6 more. I really would like to know why I couldn’t just finish the whole thing on the stove (I hate having to preheat the oven), so Green Chef fails for not explaining this. But my daughter really liked the chicken and it looks like the sauce is available commercially and it’s also fairly easy to make.
The noodle salad, OTOH, was a disappointment. It lacked flavor and none of us liked it.
I also wasn’t thrilled that the meal didn’t have any exotic ingredients. At this price point, I expect it to include things I can’t easily get at my supermarket. In all fairness, it did have some very cool looking black & white sesame seeds – but that was just for show – and it did include pickled ginger in the salad, but the salad sucked.
This meal kit had 580 calories per serving. It was on the small side and I was left hungry (but then again, I didn’t want to eat the salad).
The regular price for this meal kit is ~$26. I paid $10 with a discount, and really, I wouldn’t pay more than that.
What I love best about Gobble meals is that it takes only 15 minutes to cook a meal. And yet sometimes, I don’t have the wherewithal to spend a mere 15 minutes cooking. Saturday night was one such night.
So I made the steak and microwaved the rice, and omitted the vegetable stir fry. The steak was good, the sauce was yummy on the rice. The rice was also very good (if Gobble fails, they should go into the business of selling refrigerated rice – they do an amazing job with it). It was a perfectly fine meal. I was left hungry, even though I had the bigger half of the steak and most of the rice (my husband had gone with the kids to ice cream, so he wasn’t hungry), but that may be because I didn’t make the stir fry (though if I had, I’d still not have eaten it, as it’s not my type of thing).
All in all, not my favorite Gobble meal, but acceptable.
I think I paid around $14 for this kit with a “welcome back” promotion. I would not have been happy to pay full price ($26) for this.
The steak, sirloin, was fine but unexciting. The potatoes were blah – I mean, good, but just potatoes. But the sauce was very good and therefore, so was everything else.
The dish also included creamed kale. I wasn’t going to eat it, so I didn’t bother making it.
But this kit was another winner.
I paid around $16/$8 for this kit/per serving. Again, I thought it was worth it.
Sauce au Poivre
This sauce is to be served with steaks. I’ve doubled the quantities but it will probably still serve 2.
2 tsp olive oil
1 tsp cracked black peppercorns
1 shallot, chopped
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 tsp Dijon mustard
Add olive oil to pan where steaks were cooked and heat over medium heat. Add peppercorns and shallot and cook, stirring, for 2-3 minutes, until the shallot starts to soften. Add wine and cook for 1-2 minutes, scrapping up the brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the cream and mustard, stir and cook for an additional 30 seconds.
I’m not generally a fan of sirloin, as it’s a pretty tasteless and tougher-than-it-has-a-right-to-be cut, but the tomato sauce was good enough to make up for the meat’s deficiencies. It was one of those sauces that was weird at the beginning, but then really grew on you. And while the potatoes were sort of blah on their own, they were great with the onion mixture.
All in all, I really enjoyed this dish. I liked making it too.
All the ingredients were fresh and stayed fresh until I cook the meal. However, while the potatoes pictured in the recipe were baby potatoes that had to be halved, the ones actually provided in the kit were four regular red potatoes – the oven time obviously worked differently for them.
I paid around $16 for the kit, or $8 a portion, for this kit – using a “come back” promo I got in e-mail. That was definitely a fair price given that I got basically a restaurant quality meal out of it.
It is basically a stir fry, with both curry sauce and peanut sauce – but the peanut sauce was particularly tasty. Flavor wise, this was a winner. And, because the only things that came ready made were the curry paste and peanut sauce, I felt like I actually cooked something for my daughter.
I think I paid around $14 for this kit with a “welcome back” promotion. It produced two generous portions.
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