Why You Can Trust CNET Stock Up on These $5 Premade Pasta Dishes for the Easiest Weeknight Dinners Ever
Daily Harvest's vegan rice and pasta meals taste great, cost between $2.50 and $5 per serving and take under 5 minutes to prepare.
I've tested all the top meal delivery services and have yet to find a better value than Daily Harvest's family-style dinners.
If I need a satisfying dinner but have approximately zero time to make it, I'll usually make a takeout or delivery decision that is questionable, both financially and nutritionally. But I recently found a foil for those busy weeknight dinner conundrums in Daily Harvest's exceptionally tasty and affordable family-style pasta and grain meals.
As you warm the dish, the gluten-free pasta finishes cooking and the sauce cubes melt to join the other healthy ingredients in culinary matrimony.
I stumbled upon the new offerings while testing the healthy vegan meal delivery service late last year. The frozen bags of plant-based, gluten-free pasta and grain bowls cost $9.79 each and include either two or four servings.
The rice dishes are delicious on their own, but you can always mix in some cooked chicken, beef, shrimp or plant-based protein to round out this 5-minute meal.
The best part? These partially premade meals take one pan and only 5 minutes to heat up. All the ingredients are par-cooked and flash-frozen, with cubes of frozen sauce that melt into the dish as you warm it.
Daily Harvest has excellent vegan soups, smoothies and breakfast bowls, but I'm all in on the family-style pasta and rice dishes.
The pasta dishes were terrific -- some of the best I've had from any meal subscription or delivery service. The brown rice and quinoa-based ziti came to a perfect al dente after being gently heated in a nonstick pan. They were plenty filling, but the gluten-free pasta doesn't sit as heavily in your stomach as a traditional wheat-based noodle does.
Where else can you get a healthy, filling and delicious meal for two for under $10?
The grain dishes were equally impressive, with bold recipes featuring cilantro, onion and bell pepper and a yellow curry with chickpeas and cauliflower. I got a good caramelization on the rice by letting it sit still in the corner of a hot cast-iron or stainless-steel skillet before shaking it up and serving. All the recipes I tried were interesting, flavorful and packed with protein and superfoods in the form of kale, giant romano beans, spinach and garlic.
There are four family-style grain meals to choose from. They also cost $9.79 but come with four servings per bag.
So are these pasta and grain bowls as good of a deal as they sound? Daily Harvest lists each pasta dish as having two servings and the rice meals as having four per bag - about $5 and $2.50 per serving, respectively. For me, the pasta dishes were a true two servings but the rice dishes are more like two or three servings, not four. That's still under $5 for a thoughtfully prepared meal that takes almost no time to make.
How to order Daily Harvest's pasta and rice dishes
Daily Harvest functions as a subscription service, but you can choose as few as nine items and have your deliveries come every week, every two weeks or only every month. Your nine items or more can include smoothies, soups, flatbreads and snacks, in addition to the pasta and rice dishes.
Daily Harvest allows you to pause or cancel anytime if you're not feeling it or need a break.
Daily Harvest has excellent soups and smoothies worth adding to your monthly box.
Those other meals are between $6 and $11 per meal -- still not a bad deal -- but not quite the same value as the pasta and rice dishes. If you want, you can choose only pasta and rice dishes, but the company does occasionally run out of stock on these popular new dinner offerings.
Read my full review of Daily Harvest for more.