Chef’s Plate has been a popular food delivery service in Toronto, but has now expanded their services across Western Canada. You go on the website and select which meals you want to order for the following week.
They deliver portioned ingredients and detailed recipe cards for nutritious meals.
Delivery
They offer convenient delivery, so if you are away at work during the day, the box will be waiting at the doorstep. All you have to do is choose the day that you want the box to arrive. This works great for people with homes, but if you live in an apartment building or complex without a concierge, you don’t want this sitting freely in the lobby where anyone can snatch it.
Inside the Box
When I opened the box, there was a welcome letter and the 2 recipes that I chose for the week.
You open up the top and you can see the 2 bags of meals I ordered. Each bag has 1 recipe.
Under that is the protein sitting near the ice packs. By the time I got home around 6pm, the meat will still decently cold, but not as cold as I would have liked it. Since the beef was vacuumed sealed, I didn’t think it would spoil.
Recipes
The difficulty of the recipes definitely vary, but didn’t seem too hard. Even though I choose the Steak Provencal, which has a hard difficulty. Following the recipes were ok, but some of the steps were inconsistent or confusing.
Steak Provençal
Looking at the ingredients that came out of the bag, the tomatoes were squashed and the yellow squash was a tad bruised. I guess all the tossing on the airplane ride took its toll on these veggies. When looking closely at the package of beef, it kept saying local, but it’s local to Ontario rather than BC.
They do claim “Locally sourced specialty ingredients that are fresher than the supermarket”, but I didn’t get the sense when the ingredients arrived. Talking to a few friends in BC that received this too…their produce wasn’t fresh.
Even thought the produce wasn’t 100%, I still went ahead and cooked it anyways. I think I did a pretty good job. I really liked the smashed potatoes. A pretty good idea and I’ll most likely copy it for future dinners.
Poricini Mushroom
The produce for this was definitely better than the Steak Provençal. With this recipe, I found that it required to many pans, and also too many steps. I would have been able to create something similar using just one pot.
I found the sauce to be a little bit sparse, but thats just me.
Overall
I am pretty torn about this type of service. It’s convenient to have a pre portioned recipes arrive at the door and not worry about being at home to receive the package. But, on the other side, the recipes aren’t too overly complicated. If it’s your first few times cooking, this might be for you.
What annoyed me the most was how the produce wasn’t too fresh due to the plane journey. Also, their claim of locally sourced products, but you don’t know where they are actually from. If you’re on the West Coast, their local is different from our local.
The price is decent and I can see it being helpful for those who don’t have time to shop for groceries or meal plan.
Website: https://www.chefsplate.com/
2 Comments
Hello,
Could you tell me what Chef Plate’s ice packs are actually made of inside the plastic covering? Is it sodium polyacrylate or something like sodium polyacrylate … as it does not dissolve even after keeping it in water (at times boiling water) for 24 hours. Rather, it just turns into what seems like a million gel-like pellets.
The instructions given to us by Chef’s Plate is put the cold pack in warm water until it melts and then either cut it open and run it down the sink drain or dump the contents out in to another plastic bag and recycle the outer plastic of the ice pack
Note:
Not sure why I would not just throw out the ice pack as a whole as it does not make sense to transfer the contents from one plastic item to another.
Thank you.
Love this! Thank you for sharing such an insightful article!