Some meal kits give more of an illusion of cooking, with lots of pre-portioned ingredients and very little in the way of prep work or technique. Marley Spoon is not one of them. It is designed for people who are at least interested in meal prep themselves. 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.
Out of the 20 Marley Spoon meals I prepared, each one 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.
What surprised me was that cooking with Marley Spoon offers 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, the mashed 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.
What I didn’t like about Marley Spoon
My gripes with Marley Spoon are each small. The instructions in the recipes sometimes read convoluted. Marley Spoon says it caps every recipe at 6 steps, but that’s a bit of a gimmick because some of those steps have several substeps that might be a little confusing to greener cooks. For example, cues to set aside certain portions of prepped ingredients can get lost in the block of text. I found myself doing a lot of rereading to make sure I added a particular portion of lemon juice in step two, while reserving more for step four later
Also, Marley Spoon does require you to have a few ingredients on hand. Primarily olive oil, butter, eggs, and vinegar. They give you plenty of warning via email ahead of time to let you know what to stock, but this could be annoying for people who want their meal kit to include absolutely everything they need.
Finally, my roommate and I found the portion sizes inconsistent, tending towards a little too small. I’d hesitate to call it truly family- or kid-friendly, not because of the ingredients or flavors, but because I can’t see the 4-serving box being enough food for a household of four where people routinely go in for seconds.
Is Marley Spoon worth it?
Marley Spoon is the type of meal kit for people who genuinely like to cook, but don’t have the time or energy for involved meal planning or lengthy grocery shopping trips. While some recipes were stronger than others, they all produced comforting and delicious meals that took very little time to pull together. Even on my busiest weeknights, I had time to whip up a Marley Spoon meal.
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