Easy Dinner Hack with One Potato

Lauren, founder of Life in Play, here! As a working mom, planning and preparing weeknight meals can be a real challenge. I love to cook but with 3 kids (including 12-year-old twins!), it's hard to find the time to plan a weekly menu, shop for groceries AND cook after a long day at work.

Enter One Potato. I learned of their meal kit service while exhibiting at ABC Kids Expo and immediately fell in love with the concept. It's similar to Blue Apron or Plated, where they ship ingredients and recipe cards to your home on a weekly basis. The difference that One Potato has (and a HUGE value in my opinion!) is they cater to families. I've tried Blue Apron and other meal kit services, but none of them are as accommodating to families as One Potato.

One of the key perks to One Potato is I don't have to spend time on the weekend planning a menu. All I have to do is log into my account and select either the "omnivore" plan or the "vegetarian" plan. I can see the meals shipping that week and can make adjustments if needed. They also offer nut-free and gluten-free meals. A huge relief if someone in your family has allergies!

The second amazing difference One Potato has is they include pre-chopped ingredients. Can I get a hallelujah?! As much as I love cooking, the act of leisurely preparing meals is now saved for date nights. I don't have time for that during the week. #sorrynotsorry 

The photo above shows the ingredients inside their "Spaghetti and Turkey Meatballs with Caesar Salad" meal. As you can see, the ground turkey arrived pre-mixed with seasoning (major time saver!), as did the salad dressing and marinara sauce.

Their recipe cards clearly lay out each step and showed helpful photo examples. For this recipe, the first step was to ball the ground turkey and sear it on the outside. After a quick sear, I popped them in the oven for a few minutes before adding my spaghetti noodles to a pot of boiling water. 

Each step was simple and efficient. They have you prepare one aspect of the dish while another is cooking. I appreciated how easy the preparation was and it was clear they designed the instructions with a parent in mind. Each recipe card highlights ways to get your kids involved in the cooking. I absolutely love that. My preschooler is at the perfect age to be my sous chef. Though, as luck would have it, on this particular night she was more interested in building her lego castle than helping mama. Go figure! 

The entire cooking process took me exactly 30 minutes and that includes taking the time to stop and photograph each step. Had I not needed to document this meal, I'd say I could have had dinner ready in 20 minutes. In my opinion this is another major benefit of One Potato over other meal kit services. They know you don't want to spend 45 minutes preparing dinner. 

Let's talk about portion size. One Potato caters to families not only because they offer easy-to-prepare meals that are also kid-friendly, but they actually provide enough food to feed our family of 5. We even had left over spaghetti that I ate for lunch the next day :) 

Plating our dinner was easy thanks to my go-to plates for my crew. I absolutely adore Replay Recycled's plates. They are made from recycled milk jugs and are incredibly durable. My kids also love the fun colors and divided sections. 

Now, being a little bit of a foodie (or was a foodie... does it still count when you don't really eat out anymore??), I was impressed with the flavors of this meal. The meatballs were juicy and flavorful, the pasta sauce had a nice sweetness to it which had me wanting more, and the Caesar salad was the perfect touch to satisfy my appetite. It felt like a luxurious meal (dinner out even) without the high price tag or labor involved.  

My kids gobbled their dinners up as well. Pasta and meatballs are kind of a no-brainer for us so I knew they'd be into it. I like that every recipe in the weekly box was kid-friendly. The next night we had their "Tuscan Chicken" dish which included roasted cauliflower and avocado toast. The cauliflower was tri-colored which helped in my negotiation to get the little ones to try their veggies. Clearly One Potato is run by parents! 

My final opinion on One Potato is if you're looking for an easy way to get kid-friendly gourmet meals on the table with little effort, this is the meal kit service for you. Before learning of them, I thought there was a huge gap in the market for this type of service. No one was accommodating families. I'm glad they stepped in and developed a truly family-friendly service. Us moms and dads have so much going on (whether you work full-time or not) so it's nice to take the stress of dinner out of the equation. 

Keep doing you, One Potato!