We recently received a gift card to Plated from Josh’s family for our anniversary. Plated delivers you everything you need to make chef-designed recipes – the ingredients are labeled, perfectly measured, and you even get parchment paper (for one of the pizza recipes). Over the holidays, we gifted everyone Blue Apron (a similar service) and we loved seeing pictures of the amazing meals, so it was a treat to try Plated for ourselves.

To get started, you just create an account, then select the frequency and day of the week for delivery given your area, and customize your preferences (i.e. no pork, etc). In our first week, we received 3 meals — Soba with Red Miso, Gruyere Asparagus Pizza, and Garlicky Chicken with Squash.

For us, we really enjoyed cooking something different from our normal simple meals. It was also nice that the instructions were clearly written out and ingredients already separated. It cannot get much easier than this. The only thing we needed to do was cut up vegetables, spices and cook everything. Plated assumes you have the proper utensils (pots, pans, baking sheet, etc) and oil, salt, and pepper. I typically do most of the cooking at home, so Plated was also an excuse for Josh to cook with me!

We cooked the Garlicky Chicken with Squash on the first night the package arrived (Wednesday evening) and saved the Gruyere Asparagus Pizza and Soba with Miso until the weekend. We heard that you could freeze the ingredients if they weren’t going to be cooked immediately but we didn’t need to since everything else was vegetarian. By the weekend, all the fresh vegetables and spices were still very fresh.

We enjoyed the flavors of the food, but were disappointed by the portion sizes of the Soba with Miso and Garlicky Chicken with Squash. The Gruyere Asparagus Pizza was definitely enough food for the both of us for dinner, but the others were lunch sized portions. Maybe I eat too much? After all, I guess I am a hungry runner. Plated was a nice change to our routine, but probably not something we would regularly continue. All of the meals were heavier than what we’re used to but is a good substitute if we don’t want to go out to eat on the weekends. I imagine Plated would be a great service for people who typically do not cook at home.

Regardless, it’s definitely an experience to try and a great present idea for anyone who likes to cook and try new things!

Anyone else try Plated? What did you think?