Terra's Kitchen is a meal kit delivery subscription service with recipes created around the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle. According to Terra's Kitchen, the heart-healthy, inflammation-reducing Mediterranean diet includes "colorful fruits and vegetables, nuts, heart-healthy fats (like olive oil and avocados) and minimizes red meat, sugar, and saturated fat."
Unlike other meal kits, which offer smaller weekly menus, Terra's Kitchen offers a menu of 50+ dishes (that changes a little less frequently) with choices for vegetarian, paleo, gluten-free, and even low-calorie diets (they even have an entire nutritionist-directed "Real Diet" program for those of you looking for healthy weight loss guidance). Set your preferences, and Terra's Kitchen will match you with weekly meals to fit. Or, you can dive into the menu and pick what recipes work for you making the experience totally customizable! You may also add à la carte items like smoothies, salads, and fruit.
When you sign up, you'll also choose how many meals you'd like to receive per week. Options are:
3 Dinners for 2 People (Meals start at $9.99 per serving with a minimum weekly order of $62.99)
4 Dinners for 2 People (Meals start at $9.99 per serving with a minimum weekly order of $62.99)
2 Dinners for 4 People (Meals start at $9.99 per serving with a minimum weekly order of $62.99)
This is a review of the 3 Dinners for 2 People vegetarian option ($90.92).
My Subscription Addiction paid for this box. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)
One big difference between Terra's Kitchen and other meal kit delivery subscriptions is that it ships your ingredients in a heavy duty, reusable package.
Swing open the doors of the cooler, and you'll find all of your pre-portioned ingredients neatly packaged and arranged on its teal shelves. Ingredients are antibiotic and hormone-free and mostly GMO-free and organic.
Once you've transferred all of the chilled, fresh ingredients to your fridge, you'll follow the instructions on the box and leave it out front of your house to be picked up (and used again)! It's definitely an out-of-the-ordinary approach, but I have to say, I love it! Recycling meal subscription box after box (and its insulation, and ice packs, and other materials) still feels like I'm creating a lot of waste, so I love knowing that this one cooler will be able to be used over and over again.
The ingredients for your recipes are packaged in small, super-light plastic containers—I took the containers out of my vessel and managed to fit all of them in the crisper drawer of my fridge. Terra's Kitchen does most of the chopping, slicing, and dicing for you, which not only helps the recipes go faster but makes for smaller packages of ingredients that are easier to store.
The Subscription Box: Terra's Kitchen
The Cost: $9.99+ per serving, plus free shipping
The Products: Quality, pre-portioned (and often, pre-chopped!) ingredients plus easy-to-follow recipes for health-conscious, Mediterranean-diet-inspired dishes.
Ships to: Ships to most of the U.S.
Check out all of our Terra's Kitchen reviews and the Meal Delivery Subscription Box Directory for more food and meal kits!
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Price per Serving: $10.99
Calories per Serving: 614
Time to Table, According to Terra's Kitchen: 25 Minutes
Actual Time to Table: 25 Minutes
This recipe looked to be pretty straightforward, though there were several optional ingredients, like an egg and breadcrumbs, that made me second guess that I had everything I needed. Spoiler: I did not have those items on hand.
Gang's all here!
I started out by chopping up my cilantro and jalapeño. It's nice that Terra's Kitchen provides you with exact amounts of each ingredient, for the most part (there is a very occasional "only use half" instruction).
The chopped jalapeño is quickly sautéed with garlic and cumin in olive oil.
Mash up your black beans with a fork (it was pretty easy to do, but a potato masher tool would also work).
...Then add the sautéed mixture + your cilantro and seasoning. This is what you'll use to form your black bean patties. At this point, I could tell that an egg may be beneficial. The mix was almost entirely beans, and it seemed probable that they'd have a hard time 'sticking' into a patty shape.
This is also the point when I faced the inevitable: my avocado was, undoubtedly, unusable. I could tell as soon as I received my box due to its incredibly mushy exterior. What a bummer! I really wish that Terra's Kitchen could figure out their timing in avocado shipments a bit better. I think that this is the 4th or 5th avocado that I've received from them and immediately thrown away. The few before this were rock hard. I'm trying to cut them some slack because I do understand that there are so many factors with this very fickle fruit including shipment team, seasonality, etc. But I've never had this issue with Hello Fresh - just sayin'.
This guy went in the trash, and my husband asked if he should run to the store for a replacement. I disgruntledly told him not to bother since I was in the middle of prep, and there wasn't much left to do.
Next up: sauce time. I mixed the package of chipotle salsa with the 2 packets of sour cream. Easy.
Onto frying up the patties! I put these in my favorite saucepan with a bit of olive oil, and, as expected, they had a tough time staying in one piece. If you're not vegan, I'd recommend opting for the egg. In flipping each patty, they pretty much completely fell apart. I did my best to form them back into a patty shape with a spatula. That was mildly successful. All in all, these sort of ended up somewhere between patty and sloppy joe terrain.
However, they were tasty. Once the slider buns were toasted, they held the patties together as you ate a bit better than I was anticipating. The flavor was good! We did totally miss the avocado though, so we added some smoked cheddar in its place.
Mexican Skillet Shrimp Chilaquiles
Price per Serving: $15.99
Calories per Serving: 639
Time to Table, According to Terra's Kitchen: 30 Minutes
Actual Time to Table: 30 Minutes
Chilaquiles is one of my favorite breakfast dishes to order, but I've never prepared it myself. This was going to act as a dinner as well, so lots of firsts all around!
It's so handy to have everything ready to go. And the very clear 'use by' dates are a great guide as well.
This recipe comes with a stack of tortillas which means... yes, you'll be making the chips!
After cutting up your tortillas into quarters, carefully fry them in oil. The oil tends to shoot out of the pan, so steer clear.
I placed each chip on a plate between paper towels to soak up excess oil. You can then begin stacking your chips and chipotle salsa in a skillet.
Now, while I enjoy fish, my husband is a vegetarian. I didn't want him to miss out on this meal, so I decided that it would be easy enough to divide ingredients between two skillets and substitute the shrimp for tofu in his. So, that was exactly my plan as I laid out my foundation of chips in 2 separate skillets. Personal pan chilaquiles!
Next up, I prepared the shrimp. Like the chip frying, I had also never cooked shrimp prior to receiving this box. The directions stated that the shrimp could be placed on top of your chips, raw, and then cooked under a broiler for 3-4 minutes. Being pregnant and particularly avoidant of questionable undercooked fish situations as of lately, I opted to just lightly cook my shrimp in a pan prior to placing it on the chips. That way, I'd ensure a proper cooking time (even if it ended up more on the over-cooked side).
I prepared tofu cubes by coating them in my own chili powder, garlic, and salt and pepper to mimic the same flavor as the shrimp. Each skillet went under the broiler in my oven.
Yay, more avocado disappointment. 🙁 Luckily, this time, I was prepared.
That's better! (We went grocery shopping!)
Last step: I chopped up avocado, cilantro, and radishes for garnish. The recipe didn't indicate that the radishes needed to be chopped more than they were, but I found the slices to be quite thick, so I ended up dicing them.
Delicious! The salsa sort of soaked through the chips on the bottom and the ones on top formed a nice crispy layer. This dish was also topped with feta, and I would have loved to have more. Always more cheese! Bonus: I also had some extra shrimp to make up for my husband's chilaquiles not using it. An all-around winner!
Pinto Bean-Quinoa Cakes with Kale Salad
Price per Serving: $12.99
Calories per Serving: 674
Time to Table, According to Terra's Kitchen: 30 Minutes
Actual Time to Table: 30 Minutes
Another bean patty dish. One thing that I love about Terra's Kitchen is that they allow you to hand-pick your recipes so that you can completely customize each week's menu. However, since I go for mostly vegetarian dishes, I had found that I made it through most of Terra's Kitchen's offerings when I selected dishes for this week. I would have loved to see some more variety in options! Still, this bean patty dish looked different enough from the black bean sliders to warrant trying out both.
Love that these patties include potato for some heartiness!
Begin by cooking your quinoa as you normally would.
While my quinoa was cooking away, I chopped my potatoes and began boiling them in salted water.
Once cooked throw, I mashed up the potatoes with my rinsed beans.
Then add quinoa and seasoning to the mix.
The sauce for this dish is a mix of chipotle peppers and mayo. Spicy and creamy - one of my favorite combos!
For the accompanying side salad, your kale and cherry tomatoes are ready to go. I tend to prefer my tomatoes chopped up, so I cut about half of them in half.
I was a little confused by the wording in the directions here. Terra's Kitchen says to coat your salad in the 'dressing,' so I had to double check that they meant the balsamic vinegar that's included in the plastic packet for this meal (rather than the sauce mixture I had just prepared). I ended up adding some olive oil as well, to create a proper dressing. This is definitely a small detail, but I do find myself second-guessing certain steps. More concise directions would be ideal.
The finished product was really gorgeous! I did wind up having the same issue with these quinoa cakes as I experienced with the black bean slider patties, but not quite as bad with the crumbling. I think that the potato and softer pinto beans helped a bit. The sauce added a nice tang, and the crispiness on the outside of each patty was really nice.
Verdict: I'm continuing to enjoy my experience with Terra's Kitchen, though I am finding that there are some disappointing aspects. All of my recipes are consistently simple to execute, so that's a total plus. The pre-prepped ingredients made preparation easy as pie, though I'm still having an issue with how much extra plastic goes into packaging each item. On the downside, I'm getting to be a bit perturbed with the avocado situation. It's become a routine to make sure that we have adequate replacements on-hand prior to our box's arrival.
A little pro tip on pricing: I've found that other meal subscription boxes tend to have a set per shipment cost. It's so great that Terra's Kitchen allows you to fully customize your order, but the $62.99/box is a minimum. With this 3 meal all-veggie plan, this box cost came to $79.94. You do definitely end up paying for the convenience of pre-prepped fresh ingredients. Just know that this one is pricier than meal subscription services like Hello Fresh (that offer a set price).
What do you think of Terra's Kitchen?
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