My Prep Dish Meal Plan Review + FREE 2 Week Trial

by girlseeksjoy · Published October 2, 2020 · Updated January 26, 2021

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I just completed my first week of using the meal planning service Prep Dish and I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled. With one big day in the kitchen, getting dinner on the table for the rest of the week has been a breeze, and everyone has loved every single dish. Here is my honest review of the service.

How does Prep Dish work?

Each week you are sent an email with everything you need to prepare for the following week. You are sent a meal plan with:

4 dinner meals
breakfast
one snack
one dessert
An easy shopping list divided up by store department
Step by step (in order with efficiency in mind!) order of “prep day”
Instructions for “dish day”

The first thing you’ll do is figure out which day you’re going to go shopping and which day will be your prep day. I grocery shop online (more about that below) on Sunday, pick it up on Monday, and my prep day is Tuesday.

I would reference my meal planning post, as my process of organizing my week is still important even when using a meal planning service.

As a side note, online grocery shopping…

On Monday I printed out the pdf of the grocery list (they have a text menu that you can literally upload into a grocery site if your store has that option) and went online to order my groceries to pick up the next day.

Let me just say, as an aside, ordering groceries online is a great way to save money…especially if you have little ones.

Often, when I am shopping with my kids, I am so deep in flight or fight mode, or just answering questions every other second, that I am virtually unable to concentrate on anything else. So I end up just taking the closest thing to what I think I need off the shelf and throwing it in my basket. Not to mention all the little things my kids ask for along the way.

And I am UPTIGHT about putting extras in the basket, and yes still some sneak by!

So by the time I get to the cash, I have an extra $40-50 of who-knows-what in my cart that absolutely was not on my list.

Once I ordered everything and paid, I scheduled to pick them up the next day when I was going to be in town. Because I wasn’t picking up right away, I had a little lag time to go about my day and think of anything that I forgot to put on my list, and add it to my order before the shopper started my order (this was key, I ended up adding a few things I had forgotten that absolutely made my life easier).

The next day I pulled into Sprouts, and someone came out to my car and loaded my trunk with my groceries, bidding me a good day, all while I sat in the front seat nursing my little babe.

Dreams. Do. Come. True.

So all of that said, I was already feeling like I was floating about in meal planning blissdom.

What kind of meal plan does Prep Dish have?

Prep Dish has three meal planning options. Paleo, Keto and Gluten-Free. Here is a breakdown of what those three diets look like so that you can choose the best option for your family:

What does Prep Day look like?

Tuesdays are the weekday that my husband is home all day with our family. The next day, being Tuesday, felt like the perfectly natural time to plan my 2-3 hours of prep day time in the kitchen.

Tuesday afternoon I put some music on, told the kids I was going to be cooking and they were free to help me or go outside to help daddy with yard work. They were in and out the whole time. And I got to work.

I planned on 3 hours as this was my first time (as you get better, it should only take 2 hours). From start to finish, including clean up, it took me exactly 3 hours.

Now that may seem like a long time, but for the rest of the week, dinner only took me a few minutes to throw together. And dinner was on the table in 20 minutes or less. I would happily take the 3 hours in the kitchen on one day to save time for the rest of the week.

Not to mention, it made packing lunches for my husband so much easier throughout the week as well as there was food already made.

Are Prep Dish recipes actually good?

Oh heck yes, they were.

The soup recipe they had last week was not something I would ever put together on my own, but the flavors were incredible. As my husband said, “what isn’t to love about this?”. Not to mention, I doubled everything, so the soup lasted us multiple lunches and dinners.

Last night’s dinner was a salmon meal. I typically do not like salmon…at all. But I love the idea that these meal plans also give our family more nutritional variety since I always go for the meats I know we all love. So I made the salmon and hoped for the best. Surprisingly, it was absolutely delicious.

While the recipe called to bake it, after baking them, I finished them off by pan-searing them skin down in butter. Don’t be afraid to get a little off the path. It was a mega win, even the kids liked it!

The dessert was pumpkin chocolate chip bars which lasted only a couple of days because they were so good. The kids wouldn’t leave me alone about them.

What do I love about Prep Dish?

I am honestly so enamored with this company right now, from the ease of shopping to the prep day and the actual efficiency and intention put into the order of the prep day right down to the recipes. But here are my specific loves:

I love the meal plan options. Prep dish has three meal plan options, Paleo, Keto, and Gluten-Free. I feel like most meal planning services I have used, I have had to adapt to our diet as we try to eat as close to Paleo as possible. Once I found out about Prep Dish, I felt like I could just follow the order and not have to put the extra work into making adaptations.
The variety. I often tend to stick to the same few meals and meats. I know salmon, for instance, is so good for me, but it’s not my favorite so I usually avoid it in my meal planning. But this allows more variety both in flavors and dishes, but also nutritional variety. Ps: the salmon meal I made was awesome.
This a great way to eat a cleaner, healthier diet without feeling like I have to think so much. Everything I chose was paleo, so it was a no brainer. I added the ingredients to my grocery cart, followed the prep day instructions, and ate the food. If you have been thinking about changing your eating habits, this is a great way to get it done for you without having to think about it too much.
I really loved the efficiency of prep day. Not just that it saved me time the other nights of the week, I loved that too, but the actual efficiency of the process. I often feel like a chicken with my head cut off running around my kitchen, hoping that I can make the timing work out well. But they did a step by step order and made sure you got everything in the oven that needs to be at 350 at the same time, for example. I loved this so much.
Saves so much money. My grocery bill still was $185 (which is actually better than my $225-250 a week), but we didn’t go out to eat throughout the week because I had a plan, and there was always something to eat. One of the mornings we ended up bringing my husband’s car in to get his oil changed. Typically we could very possibly swing by the store and pick up breakfast burritos to bring to the park, but we packed up pumpkin bars and fruit instead.
Seasonal. I love that I feel the meals keep the in-season foods in mind and give me all the seasonal feels (like baked pears in fall, and pumpkin chocolate chip bars).

What didn’t I love about Prep Dish?

I’ll be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot I didn’t’ love. Honestly. But if I had to choose, here are the couple of things I would complain about…

It can be challenging to find the time to prep. 3 hours is still a lot of time to find all at one time to prep. Luckily this works really well for my family as I always buy groceries on Monday afternoons, and Tuesdays my husband is home to help me with the kids so I can get the prep work done. I would suggest doing it on the weekend if the week doesn’t seem like a good time for you to find 2-3 hours of prep time.
There are no options for swapping out meals. Of course, you can swap out ingredients on your own (not on the meal plan template, however), but there are no options to switch out the meals on the site.

How to try Prep Dish FREE for 14 days

If you want the easy-to-use shopping lists, recipe steps, “prep day” and “dish day” instructions, I highly encourage you to give Prep Dish a try. Try their 14-day FREE trial (that’s two whole meal planning weeks!) to see if you love it!

The best deal would be to go with the annual membership, as this comes out to only $2.87 a week. That is half the price of your daily latte, friend. Just think of how much money you’ll save by not going out to eat simply because you forgot to take the meat out to defrost.

Again, try the 14-day FREE trial here