Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon — Restaurant in New York

I have been getting Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon deliveries for several years now, and I have used a lot of food delivery services for many years: Blue Apron, Plated, Home Chef, Green Chef, Gobble. I have looked at Hello Fresh several times but the recipes looked pretty boring like I could do it myself.

Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon is my 2nd favorite food delivery service. Gobble is my favorite, but it is more expensive but is faster to prepare since a lot of prep is already done - the sauce is made, garlic and shallots cut up and in a bag, mashed potatoes or rice already made. Less cutting and prep work. Less meal steps.

I like Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon for: overall price variety of dishes with different flavors (9/27/23 examples: BBQ Pulled Pork Tacos, Beef/Chicken Bulgogi Sloppy Joe, Chicken Fricassee & Egg Noodles, Thai Pumpkin-coconut Curry with Chicken, Honey Garlic Pork Cutlets, Sweet & Sour Pineapple Salmon, Shrimp Tacos, Creamy Tuscan Chicken, Maple-Dijon Chicken with Carrots, Cajun-Butter Steak & Corn Salsa, Sausage & Kale Calzone, Spaghetti & Meatballs, Mixed Grain Bowl, Brown Butter Butternut Squash Ravioli, Oven-Fried Eggplant Parmesan, Vegetable Borscht, Falafel Gyro & Oven Fries, Creamy Mushroom Ragu) big selection (44 dinner choices) customizable - different meat options including Impossible meats (those are extra) portion size is good. I have had some food delivery services when you are still hungry after dinner, but not with this one. Sometimes I even can have a little extra for my in-laws. they work to become more Green, reduce their waste and help to make sure your meal is delivered to you at a safe temperature with colored temperature strips All my meat has been fresh and never spoiled I can order up to 12 dinners in any combination such as 2 of one dinner or 4 of a dinner which makes buying extra meals for my in-laws easier. there are a variety of other items you can add to your order, salads, more meats, breakfast items, smoothies, desserts, frozen dinners

Things that could be improved: I wish I could order more than 12 meals. When I order extra meals for my in-laws, it means I can only order 4 nights of dinners instead of 6 or 7 nights. I tend not to get the vegetarian dishes, since the dinner is the same price but for only vegetables. I would consider getting vegetarian dishes if there was a discount on the price. they they evolved their packaging so your ingredients for one dinner no longer come in one bag where your herbs or soft vegetables can get squished. There are separate compartments, like the meat next to the freezer packs, a tray of vegetables, another tray for spices, garlic, sauces. It is supposed to help prevent the bruising. It does take a little more time to put away all the separate ingredients (like grocery shopping) and to gather the things you need when you cook. On the positive side, there is one less big plastic bag in the world to hold your dinner like most delivery kits. Over the years, I have seen the dinners go from chicken breasts to more with chicken thighs. Sometimes, the meat can arrive with lots of little pieces of fat and gristle stuck to it, so I need to take the kitchen scissors to cut off all the parts we do not want to eat. It takes more time and is a bit gross. Sometimes one meal step can have 5 or 6 steps within it and takes time to cut up all the items and make the sauces. You are really cooking from scratch mostly. I do wish sometimes some things were done. The potato salad with two tiny potatoes can be really annoying for all the work that goes into to it for a few spoonful's. Sometimes, the potatoes are bigger.

Overall, I think Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon is one of the best food delivery companies out there for variety and number of interesting dishes and getting enough food to fill you up. We very rarely eat out at restaurants anymore, so Martha Stewart & Marley Spoon saves us money since the food is varied enough that we...

Food is tasty. Meat is high quality. Portion sizes are...okay.

TL;DR:

1. Prices are ridiculous.
2. Recipes are terribly written.
3. Packaging is so frustrating that any time saved with delivery is counter-acted by time spent struggling with the packaging.

Short Answer Essays:

1. Prices Without the sign-up discount, 16 meals (lunch and dinner for 2 people, 4 days) costs upwards of $200. I can get what I need (and more) from Stater Bros for just under $100 - and with their free pick-up service, all I do is drive up and they put bags in my car. The best part? No boxes to cut open. No ice packs to thaw and throw away. No little packets of sauces that spill everywhere. No exasperation looking at a thumb nub of (obviously not "farm fresh") ginger inside a fist sized sealed bag.
2. Recipes Feels like there are 2 or 3 people involved with each recipe and they don't communicate with each other.

For the "Tapas-Style Meatball Stew", the recipe called for 1/2 cup panko, but they didn't send enough.

Now listen to this: "Arrange meatballs over roasted vegetables in skillet, pour tomato sauce over meatballs, then STIR in 2 teaspoons of vinegar." How am I supposed to STIR anything when I'm supposed to keep the meatballs in place? Clearly, I should mix the vinegar into the sauce BEFORE pouring over the meatballs (which is what I did).

And they often include instructions like "Cut this, then that. Cut this other thing, then that other thing, and KEEP SEPARATE." Keep which ones separate? After a few recipes, I figured out that they're always referring to the last two items mentioned, but sometimes you need to keep the previous items separate too!

All of this means I need to REVIEW the recipe before actually starting, but that just defeats the time-saving benefits of having a recipe in the first place. 3) Packaging Little bits of plastic everywhere. And if you don't review the recipe beforehand, you'll probably open up packaging as you follow along, which means your hands will be WET and your knife or scissors will be WET, which means the little plastic bits will STICK to everything and you'll have to deal with that before getting back to the actual cooking.

Conclusion: Once cooked, the meals really are quite yummy. But it's really not worth...

I was a vegetarian for about a decade, from the time I was 22 to 31. Which meant a majority of the cooking I learned to do as an adult was solely vegetarian. When I met my husband (a meat eater) I began introducing meat-forward preparations into my meal planning, but I really felt like I had no idea what I was doing. What kind of steak tastes best? How do I prepare it? What about pork? What should I pair with it?

Cue meal kits! My husband and I tried them all. Blue Apron added sugar to everything. Others added too much salt. Some just didn’t develop flavors we enjoyed, and some made it impossible to recreate (by always adding their own weird spice blend). Finally, we stumbled upon Marley Spoon.

Marley Spoon was perfect for us! The dishes felt higher-end and sophisticated while being incredibly simple and easy. The flavors were spot on. The offerings spanned multiple cultures and cuisines. The selection was diverse, abundant and interesting. And best of all, I could (and have) saved the recipes to recreate and adapt for later use. In fact, my husband and I have a 3” binder full of Marley recipes we love, with notes like “warm and comforting” or “bright — a great palate cleanser” or even “easily reproduced for large dinner parties.”

I have made Marley recipes nearly every time I attend a summer picnic, a BBQ, a family gathering or a holiday meal. Every single time, folks comment on how delicious it is!

While the kits (any and all kits) can be expensive (at least, more expensive than meal prepping and making dinner on your own) — and we don’t eat out a lot, probably only 2-4 times a month — we go back to Marley kits whenever a parent will be out of town (for the convenience and ease), whenever we feel bored with what we’ve been making lately (and want to add fresh, new ideas) or around the holidays or vacations, when we are either strapped for time, pulled in many directions, or exhausted from planning, preparing and cleaning up after multiple dinner parties.

Marley Spoon is far and away the best meal kit on the market, with fresh, delicious ingredients. My family and I are grateful to have discovered their kits as a tool for so many various aspects of our lives. And now that I sound like an informercial…. Haha. I hope you try...