Everything looked so good, I didn’t know what to cook first. I chose the steak because I figured it was best to cook the meat before the veggie dishes. But to be honest I did not even need an excuse, I love steak and it was the first meal I selected. I will admit I was a little nervous but the recipe card looked really descriptive and I figured if anything else, I would just follow the pictures. Not to jump too much ahead, but Plated is awesome.
Nothing can possibly go wrong, right?
I really liked the instruction cards. They were really descriptive and I like that they gave me the ingredients to recreate these recipes on my own.
First, I washed and chopped all the veggies, then I rinsed and dried the meat.
The only thing I would change about the recipe is waiting until the other items were cooking to prep the salad. It is not a huge deal but it would have cut down on the prep time for sure.
I made a meat marinade with some oregano, rosemary, lemon, garlic and olive oil. I was to marinade it for 5 minutes room temp or put it in the fridge for an hour. The next time I make it, I will marinade the meat first just to give it that extra flavor.
While my meat marinated, I boiled the potatoes.
And made the salad dressing of olive oil, lemon, oregano, salt and pepper.
After the salad dressing prep, I let it chill in the fridge and put this bad boy in the cast iron. I should note that at this point with all the chopped veggies and lemon and garlic, my house smelled fantastic.
While that bad boy was a-sizzlin’, I went back and made my salad. At this point the potatoes were still boiling and the meat still cooking so this is when I felt that I could have chopped the salad.
Holy crust, this looked delicious.
Ok–this is really the only part of the recipe that I had a problem with. It said to sear the steak on medium heat. I warmed up my pan for five minutes and the heat still was not high enough. Next time I will put it on high to sear. The recipe has the meat to be cooked medium rare but by the time I got a good sear going, the meat was a decent medium. Which was actually ok because I like my meat medium, but it could have been more medium with a better crust.
When the steak was done, I put it on a time out (to rest) and in the same pan, I cooked my potatoes. The recipe still had the heat on medium heat but I should have cranked that puppy up to high to achieve my golden brown rounds.
After I finished cooking the potatoes, I cut the meat and plated everything.
I am not joking when I say this meal was restaurant quality and delicious. It was hearty, pretty low-calorie and everything was fresh and not processed. I really enjoyed the salad however, in the future I will definitely add an extra side veggie and a small salad. I loved the salad but I would just prefer green beans or peas. My only complaint is that I should have boiled the potatoes longer. The leftovers were fine because my microwave only knows how to nuke things, but that day they weren’t as soft as I prefer my potatoes. Random, but my Grandpa loves raw potato.
I had enough leftovers for 2 more meals!
I am sure some people would find meat portion small but the potatoes are pretty big and filing plus the salad was huge!
Overall Ratings:
Ease of Recipe: 5 out of 5 stars. Everything was explicit and the only flaw I found was the heat of the pan.
Precision of the Recipe: 5 out of 5 stars. This dish took me about 40 minutes which I thought was great and the only real hard part of the recipe was chopping the veggies.
Taste of Recipe: 5 out of 5 stars. Honestly, this dish was so good. Even when I reheated it and the meat cooked to well done, it still had such a good flavor.
Quality of Ingredients: 4 out of 5. The romaine was a bit younger than I prefer so it was more stalk than leaf. The lemon was really small. The cucumber was HUGE. I felt bad because some of it was wasted. And parsley. The amount of parsley to the potato ratio was huge. I wish I took a picture from when I first put the parsley in the pan with the potatoes because I actually had to remove so much of it. Everything was still super fresh and nothing had even the slightest bit of brown.
Final Verdict: Five out of Five stars.
Also–Plated tweeted me so I kind of love them. Their service has been spot on.
I can’t wait to try the next two meals!
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own. This post is not sponsored by Plated and I did not receive anything in exchange for this review.
Shake it Katie 