Meal Prep

from Issue Eight: Homegrown, Homelovin'

Tostadas

Meal Prep: Fast, Easy, Affordable

By: Madelyn Ostendorf When navigating through college, it is hard enough to worry about grades, paying for tuition and housing, and the hundreds of other little things that crop up on a day-to-day basis. Eating well and getting to the grocery store can sometimes plummet to the bottom of the list of things to do. However, there are many meal-prep delivery services that students can try that provide ingredients and recipes to good, complete meals that are more than just a run to McDonald’s! Here are four of our favorite ones.

Home Chef - Home Chef boasts that its service delivers fresh weekly meal kits for as low as $6.99 per serving, customized to the purchaser’s taste. This service allows its users to select meals each week, customize the meal for both taste and dietary restriction, and then cook it in under 30 minutes. It also claims that users can pause the service whenever they want or skip deliveries if they are out of town. Ideally, this means that when you go home for winter break, you won’t have perishable items sitting in the mailroom of your apartment waiting for you when you get back. Home Chef also has various meal kits, from 30 minutes, 15 minutes, oven-specific meals, grill-specific meals, gourmet and salads. To get started, users take a quiz to establish their preferences, which allows them to exclude foods from showing up in the list of available options, allowing them to see meat-free or nut-free options. They establish how many servings per meal they will be purchasing and then select the meals they would like to receive. Home Chef has served over 200 million meals during their six years of service.

Blue Apron- Starting at $7.49 per serving, Blue Apron states that all food distributed from their delivery boxes is fresh and sustainably harvested. Blue Apron also offers the option of adding, for $10 per bottle, a monthly wine pairing for your meal delivery. This service caters to individuals who don’t have time to go to the grocery store and don’t have a lot of experience cooking. Everything for the week is sent to you in perfectly proportioned amounts, so nothing is left over. They have vegetarian options to choose from but less customizability, and require more parsing through to find recipes if you have dietary restrictions. However, Blue Apron is an excellent option for people with little time on their hands. All you have to do is plug in your email address and select a plan to get started. From there, you choose what meals you want to receive for the next week and start checking your mailbox.

Sunbasket- Many meal delivery services, Sunbasket offers to send recipes and ingredients right to your doorstep. However, they also offer to send pre-made meals to you, ready to be popped in the oven after work or class. Sunbasket also provides a wide variety of personalization, from paleo to gluten-free to diabetes-friendly to pescatarian; Sunbasket is among the most inclusive in dietary restrictions. Starting at $10.99 per serving, Sun basket has hundreds of recipes to choose from. To get started, the purchaser simply picks how many servings they would like and then begins to customize what diet they would like. If they want something from the paleo menu one day and something with red meat the next, that’s an option with Sunbasket.

GreenChef- Green Chef meal delivery services is a plant-focused service, and though some options do you have meat in them, each dish is veggie-packed. Starting at $11.99 per serving, Green Chef offers purchasers three different meal types to curate menus—keto and paleo, balanced living, and plant-powered—two, four, or six people, and either three or four meals per week. This is the smallest of the box options and suitable for those who don’t need meals sent to their homes every day, but when they do want meals, they know the meals will be plant-based.