Food

To read about my Just Add Cooking April meals, click here.

As I mentioned last month, Just Add Cooking has generously offered me a week of meals a month for three months to review the service. If you read about my first experience with Just Add Cooking, you’ll know that I was hesitant to try meal delivery services but then completely changed my mind once I tried it.

One thing that keeps standing out to me is how many local ingredients Just Add Cooking uses. It’s my favorite part of getting the box, diving in and seeing what companies I recognize locally and which ones I need to learn more about. I also really love that everything is portioned out and ready to go. Being primarily responsible for meals and having a busy day job means dinner burnout, and having this delivery on a Sunday takes away a lot of the thinking, prep, and urge to just order something over GrubHub! It makes healthy, quick meals easy and also really takes the guesswork out of cooking for novices in the kitchen. Below I have reviewed each recipe we cooked last week, also sharing photos from the Just Add Cooking website, since mine are not as pretty. . . Click on the photo to get the recipe!

Seared Prawns with Salsa – I thought this recipe sounded really interesting, and we love prawns, so we went with it. I was delighted that salsa from local company Nola’s Fine Foods was included. . . I could (and um, did) eat this salsa out of the container with a spoon. It’s SO delicious. Olive Connection in Brookline carries it!

This recipe was super quick and easy and filled us both up while also leaving some of the rice for the next day. I loved the contrast of the tang and spice in the salsa with the raisins. This is a dish I would definitely love to make again. I would probably double my salsa portion. In case you didn’t know, salsa is one of my favorite foods and would be prominent in my last meal if ever I had to design one.

Beef Burger and Green Beans – I didn’t get any photos of this one because mine turned out really un-pretty. As with the burgers we had last month, I thought these were missing a binder like bread crumbs. The flavor in them, however, was excellent, with a nice bite of earthy oregano. The real stars of this dish were the plentiful veggie sides. Fresh green beans with completely addictive fried onion sprinkles and carrots with caraway seriously filled our plates and made for great additions to lunch salads the next day. After my first experience with the brand, where I wanted more veggies, they have definitely responded by adding them in, which makes the meals even more complete.

BBQ Cauliflower Chickpea Tacos – I was definitely most excited about this one, because, tacos! The green beans that came with didn’t make it to dinner; we snacked on them raw while we prepped because they were so good. The Massachusetts-made Bondat Foods taco seasoning mix added amazing flavor to chickpeas from Joe’s Kitchen in Vermont and yummy roasted cauliflower. The tacos were stuffed with a creamy coleslaw, which I actually made with purple cabbage we had that was about to go bad. We used the cabbage provided in the box for another coleslaw later in the week though! This was a seriously filling dish, and the mix of cauliflower and chickpeas made it a really hearty vegetarian option that my meat-loving husband could get behind.

All in all, another win for Just Add Cooking in our house! I think ordering the service will be particularly handy for those beach and boat weekends where we just want our meals to be easy and for the ingredients to be delivered to our doorstep.

My May Just Add Cooking delivery was provided free of charge in exchange for a blog post. I have been provided with the opportunity to share an affiliate code for new orders, where I receive compensation if the code is used. All opinions are my own.

Place your order using code TRAVEL, and I will donate my affiliate proceeds to Boston’s Forgotten Felines.