I have had the opportunity to try Dinnerly kits on a couple of different occasions. As I mentioned last week, I have not ordered from them directly, so I can’t speak to the ordering process or the actual delivery process.
My first experience was rather disappointing. I’d tried other kits first, and the Dinnerly meals just didn’t compare.
Pros:
- one of the least expensive meal kits out there per serving
- pretty basic, good for kids and people who like simple foods
- fewer preparation steps
Cons:
- not as much variety in meal choices
- ingredients come loose in the box and not packaged by meal
- no printed recipe cards included
- nothing in the box at all to indicate what meals you’ll be making
- less fresh produce and fewer ingredients in general…more entree-heavy and side-light
- no specialty meal plans, i.e. low-carb, low-calorie, keto, vegan, etc.
My son tells me that Dinnerly has you order your kits, and then you view the recipes you chose digitally (like in an app). Since I didn’t place the order, I didn’t know what the meals were supposed to be, so I had to pull up the recipe assortment for the week and try to match the ingredients that were in my boxes to the right recipes and print them out. I sorted the ingredients into ziploc bags with labels so I could easily grab what I needed as I was ready to prepare something later.
As for the recipes, there weren’t any photos to illustrate the steps as I had found in other kits. Sometimes, those can be really helpful. The instructions were not always entirely clear to me, either.
My most recent experience, though, was somewhat better. I think I just got a better assortment of meal choices. While the meals are still pretty simple and don’t involve a lot of ingredients, they were actually pretty good! The first set of meals I had were more not really what I would call complete meals. They were mainly entrees without sides. This last set I had were much better. We really liked the meals this time, but there isn’t nearly as much fresh produce involved with Dinnerly from what we’ve seen as in other meal kits.
Without further ado, here are pictures of some of the Dinnerly meals I’ve made recently.
Low-Carb Steak and Green Bean “Fries” with garlic aioli dipping sauce (I added my own homemade potato wedges and turned the thin meat sauce into a beef gravy…I had company that wanted more than 2 things for dinner!) The steak was well-seasoned and delicious, particularly with the gravy on top (I just added some beef bouillon powder and a cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce). The green bean “fries” were very good and even appealed to my non-veggie-loving kids. The garlic aioli dipping sauce was very good with the beans, too.
Kung Pao Beef and Broccoli with udon noodles. This was super easy to make and was pretty good. I would have liked a bit more sauce, as the leftovers began to dry out the next day, but it was an enjoyable meal with the sliced beef in it.
Lemony Chicken and Potatoes with broccoli. This was really good! The chicken breast was breaded and fried in olive oil. I don’t ever fry foods in oil, but I have to admit that this was really good! It was different for us. It had a very lemony sauce for dipping. My husband doesn’t like lemon in general, so he skipped the sauce. The broccoli was roasted along with the potatoes. We enjoyed it.
Baked Tortellini Parm. This was *really* good. We have another one of this same kit and look forward to enjoying it again. It’s a meatless dish, and nobody minded. It had fresh balls of mozzarella melted on top. Yum!
Garlic Parmesan Shrimp Packets with couscous. This was very good! It had a lemony garlic sauce served on top that added a very nice flavor.
Overall, these kits are more affordable than others. They are easy to make and require less prep work. But many of them are one-dish meals as opposed to a larger variety of foods, and they generally include less produce as a whole. They tend to be a bit carb-heavy, as well, so if you are calorie-conscious, you’ll need to use smaller portions of the carbs and just serve smaller portions of everything in general to keep the calories down. We generally got a lot more servings out of the meal kits than were intended, because the portion sizes are rather generous. Depending upon what features you’re looking for, this may or may not be a good choice for your family. I miss the convenience of having the pre-printed recipe cards. I ended up making my own by copying the recipe photo, ingredients, and instructions from the website and pasting them into Word so I could print out my own recipe page to keep, but that was a rather large investment of time. If you prefer looking at the recipes digitally and not keeping them, though, then this inconvenience might not bother you at all. In addition, I disliked having to sort the ingredients and make my own meal kit bags with my own labels for storage until they were used. In the end, it took a considerable amount of my time to get the contents sorted, identify and print up the recipes, and store everything as I unpacked the boxes. It might be worth it to you, though, to save a few extra dollars per serving over other meal kits.
Stay tuned for another feature post next week about a different meal kit company. I’ll continue with one new feature post in this series each week until I’ve exhausted all of the companies that we’ve tried so far.
Enjoy your week, and happy cooking!
