“This is a real Midwestern meal,” my father said, digging into a plate I’d prepared from the Martha Stewart–endorsed Dinnerly meal kit. “Meat. Potatoes. Green beans.”
This, for my father, was high praise. It was the type of meal he’d grown up with as a child in Nebraska: hearty, no-nonsense, balanced, always something green, and always a slab of meat. For a week on a visit while my mother spent time with the grandkids, I cooked him dinners with Dinnerly, the lower-cost cousin of the truly excellent, cheffy Marley Spoon meal kit also endorsed by Stewart (and also by me: 8/10, WIRED Recommends). The biggest surprise for him was how much some of these meals intersected with old-school American home scratch cooking.
The “Greek Lemon-Oregano Chicken” we were eating did indeed involve a bit of citrus, but this character was less notable than the salty savoriness of deglazed chicken broth deepened by the browned bits from the chicken. Oregano hardly felt exotic, to anyone at the table. Heck, they might even serve this chicken in Nebraska. The potatoes were Yukon golds that I’d cut, boiled, buttered, garlicked, and mashed by hand. The beans were fresh, and simple as it gets.
As with its more expensive cousin, Dinnerly’s chicken breast looked significantly better than what I’d expect to find at a mid-tier supermarket: plump, pink, and nicely trimmed of any un-renderable fats. The portions were large enough that each of us wondered whether we’d finish, but still finished.
On its best meals, which tend to be its most classic, Dinnerly doesn’t feel at all like a budget meal kit. Just as Marley Spoon does, it can feel like good home cooking. And yet it does cost about 30 percent less than Marley Spoon, adding up to $6 to $9 a serving including shipping, depending on how many you order in a week. (Preferences include “gluten-free-friendly,” low calorie, low carb, picky-eater approved, quick and easy, and vegetarian. Meals can be paused or canceled at any time.)
The seams can show a bit on some recipes, especially in terms of some apparent shortcuts on recipe development. But the real key to Dinnerly’s lower cost shows up as simplicity.
Simplicity as Parsimony
It’s hard not to compare Dinnerly and Marley Spoon. Both meal kits come from the same company, after all, founded in Germany but embellished with homemaking demiurge Martha Stewart’s brand and cooking techniques.
Both arrive the same way, in a box with ingredients for all recipes jumbled together: fresh produce and unrefrigerated food in a little box flat on the top, with meat and dairy and other more sensitive perishables on the box’s cool-packed bottom. Basic staples such as flour, butter, sugar, and oil are assumed to be in your pantry: They don’t come in the box.