Some meal kits give more of an illusion of cooking, with lots of preportioned ingredients and very little in the way of prep work or technique required. Marley Spoon, however, is designed for people who are willing to roll up their sleeves. You will be pan-searing meats, chopping vegetables, deglazing pans, and so on. If you’re an experienced cook, none of it will seem that difficult, but if your current meal planning revolves primarily around bags of Trader Joe’s frozen gnocchi, you might find the Marley Spoon meals present a modest challenge.
All of the 20 Marley Spoon recipes I prepared felt like a complete home-cooked meal. Most of them followed the same formula: a main protein anchored by vegetables and greens with the occasional addition of a carbohydrate. Except for the few pasta dishes on the menu, breads and starches keep a pretty low profile at Marley Spoon. Overall, though, everything I made seemed well-rounded and well-conceived.
Some of the best meals from the weekly menus included the chicken piccata meatballs with cauliflower mash, which was savory, lemony, and surprisingly filling; the Mexican street corn chicken salad, a sort of dressed up esquites; and the chicken with lemon butter and cauliflower rice, which was brothy and warm. Alaina’s favorites included the masala-spiced pork kebabs with cauliflower rice and cilantro and the chicken parm meatballs, the latter of which came together in a single skillet and made for an excellent work-from-home lunch.
What surprised me was that cooking with Marley Spoon taught me a few tricks that I plan on incorporating into my regular cooking repertoire. Cooking cauliflower rice under an oven broiler? Much easier than doing it in a pan. Also, mashing cauliflower with mascarpone (Martha really knows how to romance a cauliflower). The recipes were full of speedy, clever little cooking tricks, which can carry over to the cooking you do beyond the Marley Spoon box.
