WHAT’S FOR DINNER? There’s a question that makes me cringe. It was a few days after coming home from the hospital with the twins that I realised my husbands rotation of 3 recipes wasn’t going to cut it for the long haul.
And you know what sounded like really great fun one week post-partum and with 3 tiny kids under 3…grocery shopping! I wanted another option. One where I would not have to think about dinner ingredients or recipes but where my kids were still eating fresh, healthy, home cooked meals.
For us, that option was Marley Spoon (and for the record, I had no blog and no reason at all to think I would be writing this now! Marley Spoon did not ask us to write this post, it is an honest review. We have an affiliate link for $35 off your first box that you are welcome to use here)
How does it work?
Every week a box arrived at our door and Mr Little But Once popped the contents into the fridge before he left for work. The app made it easy to eliminate certain foods (for us, seafood and lamb) and set our preferences. We could hand select each week from a bunch of options or we could let it roll and Marley Spoon would send us meals based on our preferences. After a few months (6 to be exact) the babies started baby led weaning…hooray! And every Marley Spoon night I stretched the COUPLES BOX across all 5 of us. Take a look at some of the meals we were eating.
Delivery
Basically, you are delivered a box full of fresh ingredients and recipe cards (packed with photos) to your door. Everything is packed properly including cooler bags and you can opt to have it delivered in the wee hours of the morning without even coming to the door.
Preparation
Next step is cooking! You make and serve a fresh healthy meal with no shopping or planning involved. Colourful recipe cards with photos guide you through each step and most meals are designed to take 30 mins or less from start to finish. For each meal, I would make small adaptions so that the babies could also eat it. For example, subbing in strawberries when no-teeth foods came up. Or serving in easy to grab pieces.
Variety
My favourite thing (apart from the convenience) was the way that we were able to branch out into new cultural cuisines and styles of cooking that I had never tried before, while also offering this huge palate and food variation to our minis. Also, Mr LBO knows his kilojoules and daily recommended intakes back-to-front and gave most meals a big thumbs up. Nutritional info is available on every recipe card. (Good to note: in feeding 5 people with a 2 person box, the adults did have the odd piece of toast for supper after a healthy veggie packed meal)
So what were the great and not-so-great parts about our Marley Spoon experience? :
PROS:
- extremely convenient
- fresh and healthy
- new cooking skills
- lots of recipes to choose from
- easy to pause boxes
- delivered to my door
- expose the kids to a huge variety of foods
- no food wastage
- overall very yummy
CONS
- good value for service provided, but still pricey
- you still have to cook (also a pro for some?)
- packaging waste
- varying portions
That’s our round up of using Marley Spoon for a year! Have you tried it? What did you think? For $35 off your first box you can click here.
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