Terra’s Kitchen Subscription Box Review + Coupon – May 2017

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!

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 vegetarian version of the 3 Dinners for 2 People option ($62.99 per week).

One big difference between Terra's Kitchen and other meal kit delivery subscriptions is that it ships your ingredients in this 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.

My Subscription Addiction paid for this box. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)

The Subscription Box: Terra's Kitchen

The Cost: $9.99 and up per serving + 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!

Keep Track of Your Subscriptions: Add this box to your subscription list or wishlist!

Vegetable Fried Rice

Price per Serving: $9.99

Calories per Serving: 361

Time to Table, According to Terra's Kitchen: 30 Minutes

Actual Time to Table: 30 Minutes

As a new-ish cook, I'm grateful for anything that can help speed up my usual process of prepping and cooking. I've got good chopping technique, but I'm on the slower side. Add in the time it takes to wash and dry all the vegetables for my vegetarian dishes, and the time between my gathering ingredients and actually sitting down to enjoy what I've made grows and grows.

So I love that Terra's Kitchen takes some of that work off of my hands. Most of the ingredients are rinsed, peeled, and ready to rock straight out of their plastic containers. While this recipe did require me to do a quick, rough chop of the already-prepped bok choy and red onion, most of the process was just peeling open containers and pouring their contents into the pan. Cooking the rice was probably the hardest step, just since rice can be so particular, but it came out tasting aromatic and fluffy.

I love all the colors in this dish, though I'll admit that the flavor was a little on the bland side. The health bent behind Terra's Kitchen means that you'll rarely find extraneous fats, salts, or oils in a recipe (which I appreciate). They do, however, mention to "salt and pepper to taste" every so often. I don't usually salt my food, but I found that a healthy dash of good-quality salt really brought this dish to life and made the flavors even more satisfying. And I'm pretty sure the amount I used is still leagues less than the sodium content I'd get at a takeout place. My only other feeling with this dish is that I wish there were more textures to it. There's a lot of rice to go around here, and I found myself wanting something crisp, acidic or crunchy to break up the dish a bit more (after cooking, the bok choy and onion were a little too tender to provide that bite that I was looking for, though they were delicious).

Spicy Quinoa Salad Bowl

Price per Serving: $11.49 per Serving

Calories per Serving: 283

Time to Table, According to Terra's Kitchen: 30 Minutes

Actual Time to Table: 30 Minutes

Again, I love how easy the pre-prepped ingredients make things! This dish was basically just a process of cooking quinoa, making a dressing, and mixing everything together to finish. I find quinoa to be a lot more forgiving than rice—whereas I always end up with at least a little bit of rice sticking to the bottom of my pan, the quinoa went off without a hitch. Just tender, fluffy, nutty goodness.

This salad was crisp, light, and refreshing, yet it also had some heat to it, thanks to the fresh jalapenos and lime juice. I was happy to try such new, refreshing flavors in a salad, but I feel like this dish ended up being a little imbalanced in the end. It was kind of the opposite of the fried rice—where everything in the fried rice was more subtle, tender, and mild, everything in this dish was light and bright. It left me wishing the avocado slices on top were instead some kind of creamy avocado dressing that could permeate every bite. Or maybe some light, creamy cheese. Something to cut that acidic, airy flavor and make the salad a bit more satisfying and satiating.

Three-Bean Quinoa Salad

Price per Serving: $13.49

Calories per Serving: 789

Time to Table, According to Terra's Kitchen: 25 Minutes

Actual Time to Table: 25 Minutes

The last dish in the box is also quinoa based. While the instructions had me cutting the green beans in half and giving the parsley a rough chop, everything else in the recipe was ready to go right into the pan.

Again, the quinoa went off without a hitch, and assembling the many colorful veggies in this dish was pretty simple. There was, however, a lot of quinoa. It felt a bit overwhelming to the rest of the salad, even when tossing everything together.

I added enough salt and pepper to the dish to make the ingredients sing, but not be too salty, but the salad still felt imbalanced. It needed a cheese or an avocado sauce, just like the last dish. There was a vinaigrette dressing, but it was so quickly absorbed up by the quinoa that I didn't really notice it in the dish. The result was a very healthy, fresh-tasting salad that didn't feel cohesive or particularly satisfying.

Verdict: I had such an awesome experience with my first installment of Terra's Kitchen that I'm a little bummed out by how these dishes turned out. I like that this subscription has a health-conscious angle to it, but these are the kinds of dishes you dread when you try to start eating healthy—foods that are super fresh but also a little joyless. The cost of each dish is just on par with Plated or Blue Apron, but I don't feel so hot about spending $13.49 on a middle-of-the-road bean salad. I do love all of the other aspects of the service—the reusable vessel, the convenience of the pre-prepped ingredients, the easy, healthy recipes. I just wish the outcomes would've been a little bit more pizzazz.

What do you think of Terra's Kitchen?