Marley Spoon take the guess work out of weeknight cooking!
Jump onto the Marley Spoon homepage and you’ll find three simple words: ‘weeknight cooking simplified’. This is a mantra many of us can appreciate in today’s chaotic world. Busy workers, parents with young children, students studying for exams, practically anyone and everyone can agree, sometimes there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Without further adieu, we present to you Marley Spoon.
How does it work? Marley Spoon is a digital platform where seasonal ingredients and recipes are carefully curated and delivered directly to your door. Culinary Director Olivia Andrews creates seven new recipes for you every week, so you are never left bored for choice. With different delivery options available, it’s as easy as selecting the plan which suits you best, sitting back and letting the Marley Spoon team do the hard work for you. Did I mention that delivery is free? Heck yeah!
Marley Spoon have also recently teamed up with local cafes and restaurants such as Love Bites and Henley’s Wholefoods. Ever eaten a restaurant meal that you wish you had the recipe for? Well you now have chance to cook like the chefs do, from the comfort of your home.
Love Bites, sister-in-law duo
So how was my experience using Marley Spoon? Well, I love to cook. The physicality of handling raw ingredients, chopping of vegetables, stirring of a big pot, the squeeze of a lemon, it’s my kind of therapy.
I jump onto the website to find a plethora of recipes to choose from and opt for the Two Person Box, which includes two meals for two for $55. Per meal that works out to $13.75, which is pretty good value I think. I’m a little bit skeptical about my first choice- the Love Bites Super Greens Soup. It looks like the kind of super healthy green liquid you begrudgingly slurp on a 14 day liquid detox diet. But in the name of #shreddingforsummer, I decide to click order.
In the wee hours of the morning (2:30am!) I hear the delivery man drop off my order. At a slightly more civilised time, I venture outside to find a large brown box filled with ingredients and recipes for the Love Bites Soup. I’m already impressed with the step-by-step recipe card which offers both written and visual instruction plus the items that need refrigeration are neatly bundled in individual freezer packs.
Okay, time to cook. I start by chopping the garlic and zucchini. Heating a large pan with a slosh of olive oil, I tentatively wait. So far so good. I haven’t burnt the house down. The smell of sautéed garlic quickly fills the room. I begin to salivate. Tossing the diced zucchini into the pan, I keep the heat high just long enough to soften the vegetable. I soon after add the spinach, watercress, peas and a stock concentrate to the mix.
I can’t help but marvel at the beautifully green and earthy tones emitting from the pan. These veggies are practically luminescent. There’s no doubt in my mind that I am getting a hefty dose of nutritional goodness. Between sips of wine (I had to balance out the healthiness somehow), I soon blitz all the ingredients together in the pan, grate over some parmesan cheese and voila! I toast a generous hunk of bread in the oven, and lather on some butter (this part was not on the official recipe card).
As far as first impressions go, I am suitably impressed. The textural juxtaposition of the whole and blitzed peas give the meal a generous, meaty feel, with absolutely no meat added to the mix. Between slurps of soup, the dunking of bread and continual sips of my wine, I am in heaven.
The second meal I ordered was the One Pan Chicken. What I found after a long day at work was that my mum had already whipped it up herself! Bless. She told me repeatedly that the dish was exceptionally easy to make. With only a few humble ingredients, like chicken thigh, chickpeas, Spanish onion and cherry tomatoes, a delicious end product was formed. The onion slithers transformed into a sticky caramelised consistency in the pan, whilst the tomatoes cooked just enough to get that shiny roasted look. Bringing the whole dish together was a small tub of lightly flavoured natural yoghurt which we liberally spread over everything.
Every Marley Spoon meal is designed to take no more than 40 minutes to prepare. This is an honest 40 minutes as far as I’m concerned. Not the Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meal kind which takes more like an hour and a half. This really is the perfect solution for you late night 2-minute-noodle culprits.
What I like most about Marley Spoon is that it doesn’t take away the satisfaction of the actual cooking process. The ingredients are all there. For the time poor individual, it takes simply the supermarket shopping and question of what you’re going to cook out of the equation. Also, because you’re getting the exact portions for the meal you’re not wasting any ingredients. All too many times I’ve bought twenty different kinds of herbs or condiments for a dish only to watch them slowly go out of date in the pantry, never to be used again. What I also found was that the portion sizes are quite generous. I managed to squeeze another meal out of each dish, which made for an awesome and particularly enviable packed lunch at work.
Readers take note!
Marley Spoon are offering a special offer for you readers, slashing $35 off your total order. Just make sure you use the EATDRINKPLAY promo code at the checkout. To see what next weeks recipes are, and to take advantage of this awesome deal, make sure to get online.
https://marleyspoon.com.au
If you like healthy, wholesome eats like this one, why check out the Wholefood Dept in trendy Potts Point!