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.
This Gobble kit for Burmese Shredded Chicken with Coconut Rice & Burmese Salad has to be my favorite (tasting) kit meal so far! It was tasty, scrumptious, exotic, not spicy, just satisfying. It had a great mix of textures, it hit all the right notes and combined perfectly. This very much was a ‘sum of its parts” meal – I would have been very happy with a meal like this at a restaurant.
Even my super picky daughter liked it – she’d rate it 8/10!
My only criticism is that I didn’t feel like I was actually cooking anything. The coconut rice was pre-cooked, the chicken was pre-cooked, the sauce and vinaigrette was pre-made. All I had to do is arm things up and put them all together. Obviously all necessary to get this meal on the table in 15 minutes, but still, something was missing.
The taste, though, made up for it. Also, there was too little salad – about half as much lettuce as needed.
I (think I) paid ~$14 for this kit or $7 per serving, with a promo good for one week.
Freshly is a 21st century TV-dinner delivery service. What they send is freshly prepared, fully cooked, microwavable meals. Sort of like Hungry Man, but with fresher and better quality ingredients, updated recipes and no preservatives. The meals take 2 to 3 1/2 minutes to warm up and 2 more minutes before you can plate them (though nothing stops you from eating them directly from the tray, they do look better plated).
While these single-serving meals don’t really work well for dinner as a family, I do find them useful when my husband is out of town – with one daughter in college and the other with an erratic schedule, I often find myself having dinner alone. And, of course, they make convenient lunches any time I don’t have leftovers. Still, they are pricy so I prefer to think of them as dinner fare.
When I first tried Freshly, it was the first service of its kind. Since then, others have come along. I’ve really enjoyed CookUnity, a service where the meals are planned and theoretically cooked by professional chefs, which I felt was a couple of notches better than Freshly, but I decided to give Freshly another try to see if competition has made them better.
The Plans
You can subscribe to get anywhere between 4 and 12 meals a week, and a box is delivered weekly. Meals cost between $9 to $12.50 each, depending on how many you buy. I chose the standard 6-meals deal, which costs $10/meal or $60 a week – which is about the same price as meal kit companies such as Blue Apron and HelloFresh. They now also offer some premium meals at premium prices, usually $1-$2.50 more. Shipping used to be free but it’s now $10/week.
The Food
Freshly offers 48 meals to chose from, a significant expansion from the 30 they had in the past. They have greatly expanded their vegetarian and vegan offerings, they now have 6 of the latter – making it a good choice for those with pesky vegan children. The recipes are modern and classic American fare, plus some things in fashion (like Korean bibimbap). I found most of the dishes to be filling.
I thought the quality of the food was very good (save for one dish). But personally, I don’t think I’d use them frequently simply because they don’t have enough meals that appeal to me.
The meals take between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 minutes to heat up, plus 2 minutes to rest.
The Shipping and Delivery
When I first signed up, they assigned me to get my meals on a Wednesday. That’s not really convenient for type of food which is best suited for busy weekdays. However, I was able to change my preferences to get my meals on Mondays in the future.
The meals were delivered during the day with plenty of time to use them.
The Packaging
Freshly’s meals come in microwavable plastic trays, covered with a film of plastic – just like TV dinner. They do have a recyclable cardboard sleeve around each one that includes information about the meal’s ingredients and nutrition.
The trays come in a recyclable cardboard box. Both the freezer packs and the lining of the box are landfill material. It did bother me that Freshly tries to make itself appear more environmentally friendly by claiming that “most” of the lining – made out of recycled denim – is biodegreadable. That may be the case, but you cannot compost the lining (I called Freshly and confirmed this), and biodegradable matter thrown in a landfill produces methane and other greenhouse gases, for which reason most modern landfills are packed tightly so no biodegradation occurs. Freshly surely must know this, so it’s attempting to deceive its customers which gives me a bad feeling.
Same with saying that their freezer packs are “non toxic’ – well, I guess it’s something – but why not provide compostable freezer packs or those that can be emptied down the drain?
The Results
The newer meals I tried are on top. Click on the name for a thorough review.
Hearty Veggie Bolognese with Red Lentil Ziti & Parmesan Cheese
Steak Peppercorn Surprisingly tasty, juicy steak and tasty mashed potatoes
In all, they were clearly superior to frozen meals, and they were of about the same quality as meals you make from meal kits, and – depending on the restaurant choices in your area – probably about the same quality as takeout/delivery. I think at $10/meal, they’re a bit overpriced – but at $7 (what I paid for each with a promo), they make a lot of sense – at least if you are not a picky eater, and you don’t mind repeating your meals frequently.
I think that if you like enough of their offerings, Freshly is a good solution for people who want a nice meal at work/school and don’t want to go out to a restaurant or get take/out. They are certainly very quick to microwave. They also work for families like mine where it’s hard to know who is going to be eating dinner at home each night. If they had a whole line of vegan meals, I might very well get them for my vegan daughter. And they are definitely a good idea for single people who don’t want to cook for themselves every night.
But obviously, they cannot replace family dinners – the idea of each one of us eating something from a microwave is sad. If you are a family that sits together for the dinner every night, these are not for you.
I got this meal for my husband – who, unlike me, likes salmon – and he liked it quite a lot. He liked the spice on the beans, and thought the rice & salmon was very flavorful. It was supposed to be salmon cakes with rice, mind you, but one of them came completely apart as I transferred them from the microwaved trade towards the plate.
I think the fact that you don’t need a knife to eat this meal is also a plus in terms of taking it with you to work.
This meal had 460 calroies, 20 grams of fat (4 saturated), 54 grams of carbs, 12 g of sugar and 560g of sodium, which is relatively low for Freshly. Only 18 g of protein, though.
This was, by far, the worst Freshly meal I got in my first week. The chicken was tough and dry and the ranch sauce was pretty bland and tasteless. I’m not sure how you get Ranch sauce wrong – maybe when you are trying to make it healthier, but it was just so blah.
The cheddar broccoli cakes were only marginally more flavorful.
The meal had 500 calories, 20 g fat (7 saturated), 33 g of carbs & 9 sugar. It had 48 g of protein.
I paid a little under $7 for each of these meals, with a special offer.
For the first time, I got to cook a recipe that fit within two of my cooking projects. As a Hakka recipe, this meal of Singapore-Style Hakka Noodles with Summer Veggies fits into my International cuisines project. As a recipe from a meal kit, it fits into my meal kit hacks. Plus, it’s a vegan recipe, which I’m guessing will soon become a project of its own.
What’s even better, is that my daughter liked it! It’s one of the very few vegan meals she’s said she’d like me to make again.
It was, I must admit, more complicated than most of the stir fries that she eats so often now – and it used more pans – but hey, it’s all about the results. I tasted the noodles, and they were delicious – very much like the garlic noodles that you get at a variety of Asian restaurants. I’m definitely going to make them again just for me 🙂
Talking about noodles, I waited to make this dish until I could send my husband to the Asian supermarket to pick up some Hakka noodles. We usually shop at 88 Manor Market, where they have a zillion varieties of noodles, maybe more. But I also wanted him to pick up some pork belly for a different recipe and I wasn’t sure they’d have it there – so I asked him to go to Foodnet instead. I hadn’t been there before, however, and apparently Foodnet is the one noodle-free Chinese supermarket. Go figure. They did have a 4 lb box of Imperial Taste Dried Noodle, which turned out to be vermicelli-like noodles. According to the box, they had a “chewing taste!,” and they did prove to be nicely chewy. They worked great in this recipe even if they weren’t what Hakkas in Singapore would use.
I spent $10 to make this recipe, which resulted in two large bowls. That’s half of what the HelloFresh meal kit would cost (though this kit is from England, so you can’t get it anyway :-). As usual, I count the total cost of the ingredients I had to buy to make this meal, but not of the ones I already had at home.
Plated Ingredients
My Ingredients
Cost
200 g Hakka Noodles
4 lbs Taiwanese dried noodle
$5
10 g chives
1 pckg fresh chives (used less)
$2.3
30 g ginger
1 lb ginger
$2.3
1 Tbsp chili garlic sauce
2 garlic cloves + 1/8 tsp chili sauce
pantry
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp soy sauce
pantry
1 tsp mild curry powder
1 tsp mild curry powder
pantry
113 g julienned carrots
1 carrot
$0.2
1 zucchini
1/2 zucchini
pantry
113 g Green Peas
1 cup grozen green peas
pantry
200 g extra-firm tofu
8 oz extra-firm tofu
pantry
I will link to my version of the recipe once I post it on my International Cuisines site.
BBQ beef (or pork or chicken) is all about the sauce. This one was fairly good, though not among our favorites. It was sweet and tangy, probably more of the latter than we like. My husband, all in all, liked it more than I did. I found it just too sweet. Like most of the sauces we’ve encountered in Freshly meals, this one was too runny as well.
The cornbread was fairly good as well. It was probably less sweet than I like it, but it was just right for my husband.
Now, personally I don’t think this was any tastier than other refrigerated BBQ meat meals offered at the supermarket. But if you’re already subscribing to Freshly, it’s not a bad meal to include in your order.
This meal has 560 calories, and 30 grams of fat, half of which is saturated. It has 51 grams of carbs, including 19 grams of sugar and 760 mg of sodium (1/3 of your daily allotment). I wouldn’t say it’s exactly healthy – but I chose it.
My daughter and I split this meal. She got the chicken, and I got the mashed potatoes and mushroom mix that was probably meant to be eaten with the chicken.
She was happy enough with the chicken. I tasted it and found it dry, but that’s what I would expect from a microwaved chicken breast. It would have been far tastier if it was a thigh. The mashed potatoes, OTOH, were delicious. The mushroom mixture was tasty as well, it had a bacony/smoky flavor and I’m sure it’d have gone great with the chicken.
This meal has 470 calories, and 24 grams of fat, 9g of which are saturated. It has 31g of carbs, including 5g of sugar and 700 mg of sodium (almost 1/3 of your daily allotment).
The ingredients in this meal you wouldn’t use if making it yourself include natural shiitake flavor.
I paid a little under $7 for each of these meals, with a special offer.
I had no reason whatsoever to make this meal kit hack other than the fact that I’m enjoying hacking meal kit recipes and blogging about it. Hey, we all have our weird hobbies.
I did, mind you, need to use the rest of the skinless/boneless chicken thighs my husband got me by mistake a few days ago (the first half I used to make this meal hack) and I love Chicken Marsala, but I could have gone with my usual recipe – which is absolutely delicious. Granted, Plated’s recipe for Chicken Marsala is almost exactly like my own (this one doesn’t use shallots, though) – which is probably why this recipe was absolutely delicious as well.
The recipe for the chicken, that is. I did not enjoy the fingerling potatoes at all. The Dijon taste was too weird. Maybe I put too much, I had to guess how much were in the “packets” and “containers” that went with the kits, but more likely it’s just not a good combination.
I did make a couple of changes to the chicken recipe, the main one was that I used Madeira instead of Marsala. I usually keep Marsala around, but apparently I had actually run out of it the last time I used it. Madeira has very similar notes to Marsala, and I figured it would produce similar results. It did! If anything, the Madeira was better than the Marsala (or maybe, this is just a better recipe than mine).
I ended up spending almost the same amount to make this dish than I would have spent buying the kit – $18.3 for me vs $24, if bought as a subscription, or $21.4, if bought at my local Safeway. As usual, I didn’t have to spend money in some ingredients that I already had at home, but had to buy larger quantities than needed of other ingredients. I think
Plated Ingredients
My Ingredients
Cost
9 oz cremini mushrooms
8 oz sliced cremini mushrooms
$3
8 oz fingerling potatoes
20 oz fingerling potatoes (used less)
$3
1/8 oz parsley
1 Tbsp parsley
home garden
1/8 oz rosemary
2 tsp rosemary
home garden
1 lemon
1 lemon
$1.10
2 boneless chicken breasts
5 boneless chicken thighs
$5.50
2 packets butter
2 Tbsp butter
pantry
1 container chicken stock
1/2 tsp chicken stock concentrate
pantry
1 packets Dijon mustard
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
pantry
1/4 cup flour
flour
pantry
1/2 cup Marsala
1 cup Madeira
pantry
2 Tbsp heavy cream
1 qt heavy cream (used less)
$5.70
My local Safeway carries this kit often, and I would consider buying it. My big hesitation is that it comes with chicken breasts, when I really prefer thighs so much more.
Chicken Madeira
5-6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
1/2 cup flour
salt & pepper to taste
2 Tbsp butter
8 oz cremini mushrooms, sliced
2 tsp olive oil
1 cup Madeira
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/3 cup heavy cream
2 tsp chopped parsley
juice of 1/2 lemon
Cover each chicken thigh with plastic wrap and then pound until thin. Place flour in a bowl, season with salt and pepper to taste. Flour the chicken thighs and leave aside.
Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Once melted, add the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper, and cook until golden, about 8 minutes, stirring frequently. Using a slotted spoon remove mushrooms to a bowl and set aside.
Add olive oil to the skillet and heat over medium-high heat. Carefully transfer the chicken thighs to the skillet and cook until done, about 4 minutes per side. Remove to a clean plate and set aside.
Add the Madeira, chicken broth and reserved mushrooms. Cook, stirring frequently, until the liquid is reduced by half, about 5 minutes. Stir in the cream, parsley and lemon juice. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 1 minutes. Return chicken to the the skillet and cook until the chicken is warmed through, about 5 minutes.
Despite all the different companies offering meal kits out there, I wasn’t able to find any that had enough offerings in their menu that appealed to me this week. I thus decided to finally give Freshly a try.
Unlike other companies, Freshly doesn’t send out meal kits – rather, they sell refrigerated meals – basically an upgraded version of TV dinners. They have 30 varieties, each with one serving, but the menu doesn’t seem to change weekly.
Last night, only my vegan daughter and myself were hungry enough for dinner, so we tried two of the kits. They were pretty good.
Garden Veggie Bowl
Rating 7/10
This, as far as I can see, is the only semi-vegan option offered by Freshly. It does contain honey, which my daughter wants to start avoiding – a fact she didn’t share with me until after I made this order. In any case, she ate it and she enjoyed it. Indeed, this was one of her favorite meal kit meals.
The meal is basically a quinoa bowl with veggies: peas, sweet potatoes, radishes and cauliflower. She didn’t like the radishes, though, and there was only one piece of cauliflower. It has a vinaigrette dressing made of oil, vinegar, orange and lemon juice, honey and spices. This was a pretty filling meal and she didn’t finish it. It was a rather substantial meal as well – clocking at 580 calories and 34 grams of fat, but it had quite a lot of fiber and protein as well. She’d have it again, if I didn’t let her know it had honey in it. In all, she’d prefer to make her own bowl and add more cauliflower.
Heating the meal required microwaving for 2 minutes and then resting for another 2.
Steak Peppercorn
Rating 6/10
Update: I got this meal again and I was nowhere as pleased. The steak wasn’t as red or as juicy and it was underseasoned. The consistency was also a bit weird. The mashed potatoes were the same, tasty but a bit too salty.
Original Review
This is the only steak meal that Freshly offers. It’s not too surprising as steak can both be expensive and it’s hard to keep its quality through pre-cooking and microwaving. Freshly did a fairly good job in this case, though it definitely didn’t taste or had the consistency of a freshly made steak. The flavor was a little off, but I tend to be a purist about my steaks and usually prefer them unadorned by sauces or spices.
The steak was sent cooked medium rare, though I’m sure you can microwave it for an extra minute if you want it more cooked. It had enough juice to bleed into the plate.
The mashed potatoes were pretty tasty as well, sinfully so. They were too thin for my taste. They might have been gummy if not that thin, but the flavor was excellent.
I don’t like green beans, so I served these to my husband who was not hungry enough for a meal of his own, but was happy to get “something” for dinner. He thought they were OK. I wasn’t particularly hungry myself, so I was satisfied with just the meat and potatoes. In all, I think this meal is sized pretty correctly.
It took 3 1/2 minutes to heat up this meal in the microwave, and 2 more to rest.
I was surprised that this meal had both less calories and fat than the vegan one (480 calories & 27 grams of fat), though, of course, it has much more saturated fat (12 g vs 3g).
In all, this is a meal I’d have again though I wouldn’t feel compelled to.
I paid a little under $7 for each of these meals, with a special offer. They normally cost $10 each. I think at $10, they are probably overpriced. You can probably get something tastier for lunch from a restaurant for about that much. At $7, they heat the right balance between what a refrigerated meal would cost at the supermarket (and none of the ones I’ve had, have been that good) and what takeout costs.
I was planning to make a chicken stew tonight, but my husband bought skinless, boneless chicken thighs instead of the chicken parts I’d asked him to get. So I was left with trying to figure out what to make for dinner with the ingredients I had at hand. I could have easily replicated a meal I’d made before, but I saw it as an opportunity to try something new. I looked through different meal kit company sites, but the only one that had a simple recipe I could make with the stuff I had at home was EveryPlate. Perhaps I should have started with them.
This recipe for Garlic-Rosemary Chicken with Roasted Root Veggies was uncomplicated, but I thought pretty good. My daughter, who didn’t want the rosemary-garlic topping found the chicken flavorless, but that’s to be expected. The rosemary-garlic topping was good, if not gourmet quality. I’m not sure I’d make this particular dish again, however.
I used chicken thighs rather than the chicken breasts that the kit would have used, both because that’s what I had at home and because I much prefer them. I didn’t have a carrot, a sweet potato or Yukon gold potatoes, so I substituted with the two large russet potatoes I had at home.
I made this meal for 3 people. EveryPlate does not have kits that feed three, but their kit for 2 would have cost $13 (including shipping). A kit for 3, if it existed, would have cost $18. I spent ~$7.50 making it for the three of us. Had I used a carrot and sweet potatoes, it might have cost a couple of dollars more. While I didn’t buy any ingredients to make this meal, I had bought some recently enough to qualify as not being in my pantry just waiting to be used.
In general, I like bánh mì sandwiches – they are tasty, they have a little kick (actually a lot of kick, so I am careful to take out any peppers and daikon I find in them) and they are very cheap. However, they also usually have too much bread, too many vegetables and too little meat. So I was looking forward to making this Blue Apron kit for bánh mì-style beef burgers on my own. Alas, I didn’t actually look at the recipe so I didn’t realize the only vegetables they were including were carrots and radishes. Not too big of a deal, but it sort of detracts from the whole “bánh mì” experience.
The protein was ground beef mixed with curry and seasoned with salt and pepper. It was surprisingly tasty. I tend to add curry powder to pretty much anything, but I hadn’t really tried it in a burger. I will again. But what really made the burger – for me – was the bread. The demi baguette was toasted with olive oil and some salt and it just went wonderfully with the meat. I wasn’t impressed with the carrots, so I mostly pushed them up. The meal kit came with mayo and sambal oelek that you are supposed to mix together and then spread on the bread. I added too much sambla oelek, however, and it was too spicy for me so I used plain mayo on my sandwich – it was great. I used the spicy mayo on my husband’s sandwich, and while he didn’t find it spicy, he also didn’t find it particularly tasty. If you make it, skip the sambal. In any case, I really liked my sandwich and my husband liked his less.
He liked the broccoli, however, which was mixed with sesame oil and roasted. My daughter didn’t – so it’s hit and miss.
I got all the ingredients needed for the recipe, and they were all pretty fresh – though the carrots were starting to get wobbly. Still, I got my box on Monday and cooked this on Friday, so I really can’t complain.
My favorite part of the meal was the bread, which is made by Tribeca Oven in New Jersey. The demi-baguette was wider than most, the crust was softer and the center denser. I’m going to have to try to find something similar around here.
I appreciated that the kit included sugar. While I keep that at home, I know a lot of people who don’t.
I paid $12.50, or $6.25 per serving, for this kit with a sign-in promo. It was worth this but not the $20 regular price, as you can get a real bánh mì for less.
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