NOT ANOTHER APRON

​What I am about to explain is nothing like your typical apron food delivery service.  The big players in the market just end up being glorified grocery delivery services.  A lot of people go to these services for convenience because of busy lives or stressful workdays.  The problem is that the time requirement with most of the services still require 30+ minutes to get food to the table.  They also require measuring, cutting, chopping, and mixing.  These are all things that remove the convenience of the delivery.  On the other hand, one thing that was always appealing are the variety they provide to weekly meals.  My wife and I always find ourselves falling back into a never ending repeating menu of Naan Pizza and Salads.  When you are feeling lazy or suffering from decision fatigue you can just rely on one of these meals to get you through.  My wife and I did not want to pay $10 for a meal that I still have to prep and cook though so we never committed.  This was when I met a man named Mark Rigdon while coaching my athletes at Ironman Chattanooga.  He told me of his sister’s Nashville based company MyVeggieChef.  Kristie Holdren, a certified Nutrition Health Coach, uses her expansive knowledge to build a colorful vegan meal delivery service.

---

​I got home from Ironman Chattanooga and figured why not give this one a try.  The prices seemed reasonable, the variety was there, and most importantly it was plant-based.  Plant-based meal delivery is where the other players fall short.  I went to a couple of the providers and while their menus were bigger there was only one true vegetarian meal.  Other criteria that my wife and I had were ease of prepping or cooking, time to table, and taste.

---

Ordering/Meal Selection:

​Ordering from MyVeggieChef is made simple through the combination of pictures and a few select words.  Under the menu page there will be this week’s menu and the upcoming menu.  At the top of the page you will see an easy button to “order now”.  MyVeggieChef gives you the option to order through subscription or week by week.  This first order I was not ready to fully commit so I went with the week to week option.  The cool thing is that they don’t add on any stupid charges for doing it week to week.  The price of the meals is the price of the meals whether you have a reoccurring subscription or order week to week.  If you go with the subscription option you can choose to have meals delivered every 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks.
​
Once you decide which path you want to take you will land on a page with pictures for this week’s menu.  This screen will allow you to mix and match the quantity of each meal.  For example, let’s say there is something on the menu you know you won’t like then you can increase the quantity of another.  If you are Mark then you can just have all 5 of your meals be the butternut squash and black bean burritos!  My wife and I liked the prospect of all 5 recipes the week we ordered so we just stuck with the default 1x quantity.  Saturday morning the FedEx man showed up with a big box.  Inside was a cooler that had all of the frozen meals.  We took one of the meals out and placed in in the fridge to thaw and the other four meals into the freeze for a later date.

​Note: Just order before Tuesday the week of delivery in order to get that menu.  You can’t screw this up.

---

Prepping/Cooking

This is where MyVeggieChef really stands out against its competitors.  If you are really looking for that convenient and tasty meal service, you can’t go wrong with MyVeggieChef.  All of the meals are delivered frozen in Ziploc bags or disposable/reusable Tupperware.  The first step of meal prep is to take the meal out of your freezer and place it in the fridge the night prior.  Kristie recommends 24 hours of fridge time to thaw out the food.  A couple of times we took out the bag in the morning and left it on the counter to thaw.  By the time I got home from work it was thawed out and I just placed it into the fridge to stay cool.

​One thing that made this service stand out was that all of the chopping and mixing was completed prior to delivery.  The only requirement on our part was to cook!  A couple of the recipes had diced veggies that required some sautéing.  After that you just needed to add any other ingredients to the pan and boom, food is ready.  All in all, the meal would take around 15 minutes to cook and clean up.  There was one meal that took a little extra time to cook because it had rice and some of the ingredients need to simmer for additional depth of flavor.

---

---

Taste/portion size:

My wife and I were very hesitant about serving size.  We both just assumed that the portions were going to be small.  We both imagined the ridiculous serving sizes most packaged products recommend.  We were both extremely surprised after cooking the first meal.  When MyVeggieChef says you get 4 servings per meal you really get 4 solid serving sizes.  Every night we had plenty of leftovers for lunch later in the week.  Keep in mind that I am an athlete and I eat a lot.  Even during my heaviest training blocks there would still be leftovers.

​Taste… extremely important aspect to the meal delivery service.  This was one thing that I was not afraid of when ordering.  I could tell from the pictures, ingredients, and the experience of the head chef that the meals were going to be tasty and satisfying.  My wife and I were not let down the slightest. This Nashville based company plays off of the southern roots to keep the flavor high as well as satisfaction.  Every meal, I mean every single meal, was absolutely top notch restaurant flavor filled food.  The great thing is that since MyVeggieChef does all of the mixing and chopping the experience for every customer will be similar.  You can’t mess it up by using the wrong ingredient like those other services.

---

​I was honestly and surprisingly satisfied with the entire experience.  MyVeggieChef gave my wife and me an easy meal to cook and enjoy.  We ended up using the prepared meals on days we knew would be stressful.  It prevented numerous pizza deliveries and cheap Chinese food filled nights.  In the end we loved MyVeggieChef’s variety, convenience, and colorful menu so much that we decided to sign up for the subscription.  I recommend everyone to give MyVeggieChef a shot.  MyVeggieChef has been gracious enough to offer all of my readers a 10% discount!  This will make shipping free and make the serving cost only $6.00!!! That is half the price of the competitors.  You might as well try it once…

---

10% ​COUPON CODE: coachcolinlovesmyveggiechef