For over a year now, I have been wanting to do a review of the food delivery services such as Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, etc.  I just have never gotten around to it.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Williams Sonoma, one of my favorite retailers, was advertising a similar service called Sun Basket.  It had no commitments and offered 2 meals for 3 days a week, which was exactly what we wanted.  There are several meal plan options such as vegan, weight loss, etc.  Mike and I decided to try it.

Our order was placed a week and a couple of days before our first delivery.  Our delivery date was for a Tuesday, although I did notice that the day of the week could be changed.  For Tuesday delivery, we had until noon on the preceding Thursday to make our meal selections.  Meal selections could be from any of the meal plans, and each week one meal option is a breakfast smoothie.

A large sturdy box arrived on the appointed date.  It included 3 brown paper bags marked with a label of which meal was inside.  A booklet included all the recipes for the week.  Basic kitchen utensils and food prep items (oil, salt, pepper) are required and listed in the recipes.

The first meal we prepared was grilled chicken with white bean salad.  It was raining, so I pan-fried the chicken.  It turned out wonderfully!

I was impressed with the quality of the vegetables included.  The herbs were beautiful and fresh.  The corn and lemon were better than I can purchase locally…absolutely beautiful.  The cherry tomatoes were lovely, although a couple were wrinkled from age.

The recipe was listed as taking 20 minutes to prepare.  It actually took me an hour.  Not sure why, since I am an avid cook and had everything required at my finger tips.  It may have been that I did not go through and wash all the vegetables at the same time, but I don’t think that burned 40 minutes!

Once it was on the plate, I wondered if there was enough food and how it would taste.  It was wonderful!  The chicken was moist and tasty, having been covered in salsa verde.  The white bean salad, which included salsa verde, white beans, corn kernels, tomatoes, and basil, was amazing!  It was a great recipe and a good way to work in beans, of which Mike and I need to eat more.

The other two meals were equally delicious and inventive.  We prepared the grilled pork chop with baked sweet potato and onion and a watercress, peach, radish salad on Wednesday.  One of the two peaches had to be thrown away.

We cooked the last meal on Friday night.  It was a Vietnamese stir-fry with jasmine rice.  The squash and bell pepper were past their prime.  Since this is my only experience with the mail-order meals, I don’t know if this is a problem with all of the services or just Sun Basket.  Even with that big issue, I would still  be willing to try them again. We did receive a discount, so the 3 meals that each served two people cost us $33.94.  It appears that without the discount, it would run about $68.94 for the same number of  meals.

With the intent of wanting to try several of these companies, I went ahead and cancelled the service.  In order to cancel, I had to send a message to their help email address.  They responded the next day to say my subscription had been cancelled.

Mike and I were both really pleased with Sun Basket.  We were not sure what to expect, but Sun Basket set the bar a high for the others.  We liked the convenience of not having to grocery shop; we liked the recipes which were more gourmet; and we liked that the ingredients were exotic (i.e. harissa and sambal oelek).

I can’t wait to try a few more services to see what all is out there.  Just to make it more interesting, I have heard there is a local company that offers a similar service as well with healthy meals.  I look forward to trying more of these services and sharing my feedback with you.