Chefs Plate makes meal planning at home easy! You can choose from a variety of weekly menu offerings and all the ingredients and recipes get sent straight to your door. Each meal comes with an easy to follow recipe card that lets you know how to make your delicious meal. It’s a great way to not only save time, but also try out new meals that you’ve never tried before!
I’ve been trying out meal prep boxes for a few years now and have enjoyed the new meal ideas that they come along with. My favourite part about them is that you can keep the recipe cards they come with and add it to your recipe box. Needless to say, when Chefs Plate reached out to sponsor this post, I jumped at the chance to try their recipes out. After looking through a plethora of options on the Chefs Plate website, I decided to try out their Meatball & Mushroom Risotto Recipe. Typically they would drop off all the ingredients portioned and ready to go at your door at your scheduled time but due to covid restrictions, I had to go out to get my own ingredients.
Ingredients
- 250g ground park
- 3/4 cup Arborio rice
- 1 yellow onion
- 18g soy sauce
- 1 cube chicken stock reduction
- 113g mushrooms
- 56g basil pesto
- 60g cooking wine
- 28g Parmesan cheese
- 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
- 56g green peas
- 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning blend
- salt and pepper to taste
Making the risotto
As intimidating as making risotto sounded, we found solace in that there were only 6 steps to making the recipe. Not only that, but it could be made in 35 mins! We started off reading through the recipe. Then we sautéed the mushrooms, and onions until soft before adding in the Italian herbs and Arborio rice. After that we added in cooking wine, water, chicken stock, soy sauce and peas.
Once we put everything into the pot, we waited for the risotto to simmer until the rice was tender and all the liquid was absorbed. While the risotto was cooking, we stirred the pot intermittently to ensure that nothing would get stuck to the bottom of the pot. We also seasoned the risotto with salt and pepper.
Making the meatballs
While the risotto was going on the stove, we prepared the meatballs. We decided that we would pan-fry the meatballs instead of baking them in the oven because we ran out of parchment paper. It would have definitely been easier to bake them though because there would be less pans to manage at once. To make the meatballs, we combined the ground pork, garlic bread crumbs, salt and pepper into a large bowl. Then for some reason, we put in the left over onion by accident which was a HUGE error because the meatballs did not stick together well. We ended up taking out as much of the onions as we could so they would hold together. That aside, the meatballs were easy to make and I was surprised that we didn’t need to use a binder like egg to hold it together.
Next we pan-fried the meatballs until the were golden brown and cooked all the way through. Alternatively you can also bake them in the oven for 15-20 minutes instead. By the time our meatballs were done cooking, our risotto was ready too. All that was left was the finishing touches of stirring in the Parmesan cheese and a pat of butter before drizzling the pesto oil on top.
The result
I loved how creamy and flavourful the risotto was! There was the perfect amount of seasonings and there was the Parmesan cheese added umami savoury notes to the dish. The meatballs were easy to make and held together well. While we made them a little different from what the recipe intended, they turned out perfectly as well. Since the dish was already so delicious, we weren’t sure if the pesto oil would add anything more to it. Fortunately we were wrong about that because the pesto added brightness and earthiness to the dish. Our only feedback would be that the recipe may be hard to remake at home without the recipe box providing measured out ingredients if you didn’t have an electronic scale because some of the measurements were provided in grams. Overall, we give this recipe 4.5 stars out of 5 and would make it again in a heartbeat!
