Dinner on The Table: GreenChef

Starting in September 2021 and continuing weekly ever since, my family of four (there are five of us, but Sawyer does not eat real food) has been trying and mostly loving the meals from GreenChef. I will try to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was not given any free product, only the coupons that come in the mail.

Affiliate links are included below. 

Why we tried GreenChef

I’m sick of cooking and my husband is sick of take-out. Let’s keep it real. This pandemic has destroyed my will to meal plan and make fresh, interesting meals for my family. My husband and teen sons are totally happy to cook as long as I continue to meal plan and shop. Yeah, no. While I want to tap into their willingness, I don’t want to be on the hook for all the other parts of the process.

We got a giant coupon to try GreenChef, a meal-planning kit service, about five months ago. We were drawn to GreenChef in particular because it offered plant-based meals as an option with a LOT less packaging than some of the other guys.

Once you select meal type, the preference sticks until you change it. Each week, GreenChef chooses two meals that fit our chosen type and we can swap them out for others if we like. Since we started on the vegan path, it took us several weeks to learn that we could switch it up and try the delicious salmon meals by choosing a different baseline like “keto and paleo” or “no carbs but meat is ok”. At this point, we’re living like “balanced living omnivores” and we can always change again.

What we like about GreenChef

Each week, we receive the two different recipes’ ingredients with colorful and easy-to-follow recipe cards. They assume you have basic stables like olive oil and salt at home, but walk you through everything with photographs and tips — so helpful for any ADHD folks trying to get the steps right.

My husband, Alec, is happy to cook without planning. My oldest, Holden, is happy to try lots of different tasty foods. He recently logged in and chose the next few weeks himself and doesn’t yet know he’ll be cooking some of them. My middle child, Milo, is reasonably happy with the dinner choices, but usually thinks everything is too spicy.

What I really love about GreenChef

I absolutely love that my family members are pitching in by choosing and preparing meals more often, and I can just show up and eat.

Check it out while that big sale is still going on >

What’s not so great about GreenChef

To be honest, we’re pretty happy with our twice-a-week dinner rescue. We can easily supplement with meals we like to cook, hot dogs, and local restaurants. But here are a few things you may not like:

• It is expensive. After that first big coupon runs out, you have to really want it.
• The vegan meals, in my opinion, rely too heavily on roasted red peppers.
• My friend, Stefania, thinks they use barely any spice (but my ninth grader wholly disagrees with that assessment).