And the ingredients are trimmed to bare essentials. The aforementioned risotto is a nine-ingredient, one-pan, veggie-only recipe whose flavor accents are pared down to lemon and garlic. A pork chop dish one-ups this with just seven ingredients, none of which is a starch, with fresh rosemary and garlic doing the duty as an aromatic.

A “prep-ahead” meal of ponzu beef is designed so that you’ll add other ingredients to make more than one meal with the same bavette-steak baseline—doubling the portions of pan-seared, ponzu-saucy beef but leaving out every other substantial ingredient except chopped onions.

When the recipe was mostly done, I looked down at my chopped steak and onion, lightly shimmering with sauce and oil, and got a flashback to my time in South Philly. All I needed was Cooper sharp and an Italian roll. I had pretty much slapped together a ginger-citrus-accented filling to a cheesesteak. That, or I’d need to whip up a batch of rice in my beloved, well-used Zojirushi 3-Cup to make it a meal, maybe throw a veggie into the bargain.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I had no hitches with my cooking instructions, another bonus side effect of simplicity. There’s less to screw up. And on one recipe, a garlic rosemary pork, I actually managed to finish the recipe within the 45 minutes they allotted: A rare moment of honesty utterly ruined by a 40-minute risotto that EveryPlate’s recipe card told me would only require five “active” minutes at the stove.

Sorry, it’s risotto. You’re at the stove the whole time. That’s how risotto works.

Some Assembly Required

The simplicity of the flavor accents is far from a problem. Often, it’s a virtue. But in terms of base ingredients, some of EveryPlate’s meals can feel almost incomplete. Calorie counts tend to be a little lower than HelloFresh. And it can also feel like one component is missing on each EveryPlate meal before it becomes quite balanced: meat and veggies without a starch, or a starch without much protein.

The risotto offers an option to pay extra to upgrade to chicken or salmon, of course—an upgrade that’s not at all needed for flavor. By the time I’d gotten done tending to the rice, ladling the water over it again and again and cooking it back down, and adding cream sauce and more Parmesan and a healthy dollop of butter, the rice was rich, lovely, fragrant, and still just the slightest bit al dente. The peas, added late to the dish, still popped brightly with each bite. But still, it’s not a protein-packed meal: It’s carbs and dairy and veg.