Skip to main content

Cook Unity Meal Kit Reviews

Sexy Nerd and I finally gave one of those ready-made, mail-order meal services a try. We were skeptical, afraid we'd receive what's basically an expensive TV dinner, but now we're hooked.

Meal kit reviews
Posing with the Thai Basil Chicken meal, looking quite the professional-yet-unofficial spokesperson, if I do say so myself.

Best meal delivery service
Insert your favorite celebrity chef catchphrase here.

“You’re like a blackjack dealer at the Flavortown Casino.” — Guy Fieri

Cook Unity Reviews
So much for my professional attire. SN zoomed out a little too far in this one. Surprise - slipper socks!

Cook Unity Reviews

Cook Unity meals are gourmet restaurant-quality. With the $60 off your 1st order promotion, which is DOUBLE their typical discount, you can taste these meals for yourself practically for free! This blog post has not been sponsored in any way by Cook Unity or any other meal delivery service. We just really love the meals!

Cook Unity Mushroom Cavatelli
The Cook Unity Mushroom Cavatelli with Mascarpone and Chives pairs nicely with Cook Unity's Mixed Green Salad with Roasted Beets and Goat Cheese (1 out of 2 plates because we split each meal to share)

Over the past several months, we have tried most of Cook Unity's meals. Their site features a helpful ratings and reviews feature, so you can limit your meals to only the most popular.

Finally, a meal service that arrives ready to eat!
Cook Unity's Salmon with Avocado Sauce and Cucumber Salsa paired with their Creole Braised Vegetables with Black Mushroom Rice

We love our private chef
Easiest date night ever.

Creating your own 16-pack? We've ordered like a million of these things by now. Here are our favorite Cook Unity meals:
  1. Chicken Schnitzel with Dijon Smashed Potatoes (our favorite so far)
  2. Lamb Ragout with Cheese Ravioli (our second favorite so far - some meals, like this one, have a small surcharge because they cost more to make, but the surcharge is waived with your 1st order)
  3. Mushroom Cavatelli with Mascarpone and Chives (our third favorite so far)
  4. Mixed Green Salad with Roasted Beets and Goat Cheese (our fourth favorite so far)
  5. Blackened Salmon with Creamed Leeks (our fifth favorite so far)
  6. Pork Tenderloin with Caramelized Onion with Gorgonzola Sweet Potato Gratin (6th favorite)
  7. Patarashka-Style Redfish with Bok Choy and Quinoa
  8. Creole Braised Vegetables with Black Mushroom Rice (so tasty, especially the plantains, but my carnivorous SN was still hungry afterward)
  9. Thai Basil Chicken with Shiitake Mushrooms and Green Beans (good but the chicken was a bit too pink for my comfort - SN said it was perfectly fine and was probably right)
  10. Thai Green Curry with Chicken and Jasmine Rice (we love curry and the ones from Cook Unity do an impressive job of competing with our local favorites)(shout out to Albuquerque's The Orchid and Thai Street)
  11. Panang Curry with Beef (told you we love curry - SN had never tried it before he met me, omg)
  12. Thai Red Curry with Chicken (time to start winding down these comments)
  13. Salmon Ginger Cakes
  14. Pork Caribbean Stew with Red Beans and Rice
  15. Beef Bourguignon with Buttered Egg Noodles
  16. Cod en Persillade with Lemon Orzo
Meal service with gourmet chefs
Mushroom Cavatelli with Mascarpone and Chives - easy to see why this is one of our favorite Cook Unity meals, right? So cheesy and flavorful!

What Makes Cook Unity the Best Meal Kit Service?

There's a lot to love about Cook Unity. Almost everything we've tasted has been phenomenal, courtesy of recipes designed and prepared by professionally trained chefs. Another plus is that Cook Unity encourages you to look through the available choices before providing your payment information, which almost no other service allows. What are they trying to hide? This has always felt suspicious to me, like a bait-and-switch.

These are important, but there is one thing I especially love about Cook Unity, something that blows all the competing meal services out of the water. Remember my complaints about Hello Fresh?

Every meal arrives ready to eat! Why would I want to spend my money on a meal kit service that makes me pay to ship a bunch of carrots to my house? I can buy my own groceries. These days, they'll even be delivered to my house for free. Everyone posts their favorite meal service recipes online, so if you love to cook, save yourself a bunch of money by removing the ingredients and delivery part from the equation.

SN and I work hard, often arriving home too exhausted to put effort into boiling pasta. These premade meals have changed our life.

Mail Order Meal Delivery: The Process and Returns

What happens if my mail order meal arrives damaged?Our first Cook Unity box arrived a bit smashed, but the meals inside were fine. I instructed Olive and Bernadette to pose for a photo next to the box. In hindsight, I suppose it is asking a lot for a dog to hold still next to a box of food. They did a better job than Biscuit, who wouldn't even humor me.

We placed our initial Cook Unity order in March, 2022. Now that we've been happy customers for such a long time, we have had a few run-ins with delivery mishaps. It has never been Cook Unity's fault, always the shipping company. 

For example, UPS once delayed our Friday delivery due to weather, but the package still made it to our distribution center on the delivery date. The box was clearly marked as being perishable meals, yet UPS opted not to deliver the package Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. By the time we received the package at the end of Monday, left out in the summer sun, considering eating any of it seemed foolish.

Still, it broke our hearts to throw away those chef-prepared meals. Creole Spaghetti and Smoked Sausage! Thai Basil Chicken with Shiitake Mushrooms and Green Beans! Luckily, Cook Unity insures every delivery and receiving a free replacement took no effort at all. 

Cook Unity Meals: Before and After

Cook Unity Reviews
Detailed cooking instructions, nutritional information, and ingredients are included with every meal. My favorite part of the box is the chef. As you try new meals, you learn which chefs are your favorites. Whenever Chef Nahika Hillery releases a new option, I order it without hesitation, even if it doesn't have any reviews yet. Everything she makes is packed with unique flavors.

Photos of Cook Unity meals
Cook Unity meals cook right in their container, so there's no cleanup to worry about. Well, unless you like to be fancy like us and transfer your meals to dishes. SN and I enjoy pretending to have our own private chef. We clink our wine glasses and let out our best snooty rich person laughs.

In the Before photo above, we were skeptical that the salad would be edible. It doesn't look great, does it?

Mushroom Cavatelli with Mascarpone and Chives
Not only was the Mixed Green Salad with Roasted Beets excellent, we enjoyed it so much that we always include it with our CookUnity orders.

Green dining room
Cheesy! (The blogger, but also the food.)

Food Blogs
5 stars! With two of my favorites combined into a single meal, my private chef has outdone themself.

Compare meal kits
Yellow Curry with Shellfish - Before

Yellow Curry with Shellfish
Yellow Curry with Shellfish - After

Only SN ate this one because I don't do shellfish. He loved it.

Cute dog
Biscuit has a Cook Unity complaint. There should be meals available for dogs, obviously.

Can You Freeze Cook Unity Meals?

For our bargain 1st order, I ordered the 16-pack. My plan was to go with a smaller quantity, but there were too many choices to resist. This provided 8 dinners, as SN and I like to share.

Can You Freeze Cook Unity Meals?
SN and I have maintained our 16-pack plan but stretched out to be every 2-3 weeks instead of weekly. The majority of meals freeze beautifully, despite Cook Unity's recommendation to eat them fresh, so it makes sense to order the largest plan. By purchasing in bulk, you receive the lowest cost per meal.

When deciding what to freeze and what to enjoy fresh, some good options are obvious, like poultry and lasagna, which you probably already have in your freezer. We prioritize keeping ingredients that are not meant to be cooked fresh, such as salads and meals that contain raw cucumber and tomatoes as part of a side dish.

We also try to eat fresh salmon immediately. It's still okay after being frozen, but it seems a shame to freeze such high quality seafood.

How Much Does Cook Unity Cost?

Prior to embracing the meal service lifestyle, SN and I went out for dinner almost every weeknight. We were too tired to cook and, let's face it, tired people don't prepare the tastiest food. When our schedules didn't align for restaurant plans, it wasn't uncommon for me to work a 14+ hour shift without breaks, eat cereal for dinner, and collapse into bed so I could wake up early and do it all over again.

The point I'm trying to make is that Cook Unity is much less expensive than going out to eat. I suppose I'm also making the point that it's more expensive than cereal.

Okay, I can be a bit more specific with pricing than that:

How much does Cook Unity cost?
Ready to try Cook Unity for yourself? As you can see from the prices above, the $60 off your 1st order promotion makes it a no brainer.

Eating Healthy with Cook Unity

There are options for every dietary preference, including but not limited to Keto, Paleo, and Vegan. The nutritional information is easy to see when choosing your meals.

A neat trick we've discovered is to bring Cook Unity meals with you on trips. SN's job often has him traveling for a week or longer. He sometimes finds himself in a food desert, unable to find healthy options. He throws a few frozen dinners in an insulated bag with an ice pack. For really long business trips, we just have the meals delivered to his hotel.

Cook Unity Photos
Bon appetit!

Popular posts from this blog

Cake Mix Pancakes

This reader-favorite recipe is *almost* as popular as my Cake Mix Cookie Bars recipe .  When making Cake Mix pancakes , the scrumptious possibilities are endless. Red Velvet cake mix pancakes. Chocolate cake mix pancakes. Butter Pecan cake mix pancakes. Funfetti cake mix pancakes. (Yes, Funfetti cake mix pancakes!) With this 2-ingredient recipe, you can turn your favorite cake mix into your favorite pancakes. Pancake making at its finest. Cake Mix Pancakes Personally, I think my funny napkin is the icing on the (pan)cake. It's Sunday morning and you're planning to do all the things today - scrub those grody baseboards, polish your quartz countertop that was supposed to be low maintenance but actually isn't at all, sort through the disaster that is the freezer.  While on your superhuman kick, you think I'm going to make my family pancakes for breakfast. Not just any pancakes - the best pancakes ever. I may even serve them as breakfast in bed! You pu

10 Canned Cinnamon Roll Hacks

You're in for a treat. Today I'm sharing my best canned cinnamon roll hacks and improvements for turning store-bought cinnamon rolls, like the Pillsbury Grands ones or even the store brand, into something special.  Dry cinnamon rolls? No thank you. They need to be OOEY and GOOEY. That's just Cinnamon Roll 101. All of these ideas keep Pillsbury canned cinnamon rolls soft, company-worthy, and delicious. These are also great for taking homemade cinnamon rolls up a notch, but what a pain that is. With these better-than-homemade canned cinnamon roll hacks, you'll never bother to bake them from scratch again. Test out some of these ideas tomorrow. Won't it be nice to dig into a mouthwatering cinnamon roll for breakfast? You can't get a better start to your day than that. Canned Cinnamon Roll Hacks Actually, make that 11 easy ways to improve store-bought cinnamon rolls: you can top them with homemade coffee whipped cream . Yum! Nope, make that 12 canned cinnam

Chemical Peel Before & After

This article has been updated! My new chemical peel post, which includes pricing, Jessner peel before and after photos, product recommendations, and a helpful timeline for scheduling your treatments, is at the bottom. My original Jessner peel post (one of the most popular on my site of all time) is at the beginning. Original Chemical Peel Article Considering a chemical peel? I recently underwent my first Jessner peel and thought I'd share my results, post a Jessner peel review, and answer some frequently asked chemical peel questions. (I'm guessing that "Does a chemical peel hurt?" is a biggie!) I'd been planning to order an over-the-counter peel when we were in Iceland , but my computer led me a different direction. I decided to do this on a whim after Groupon greeted me one morning with a great $40 chemical peel deal. Now, I can read your mind. You just gasped in horror and thought  You trusted your face to a  discount  chemical peel?!  You're wondering w

How to Move a Mattress

My site is popular for reviewing memory foam mattresses. With today's bed-in-a-box options lasting much longer than the traditional 7 years of a spring mattress, there's a good chance you'll eventually need to move one. But how? This is  how to move a mattress  without damaging it - even by yourself!  When we were faced with the challenge of moving our beloved Amerisleep AS3  to our new home, it seemed like my readers would enjoy the details. This handy tip should work for any memory foam bed, including Casper, Leesa, and Nectar.  I'm happy to report there is an extremely simple way to do it. Apartment and dorm dwellers rejoice! How to Move a Mattress At first, I wasn't sure how to move our king-size mattress down a flight of stairs. It's a problem we've dreaded solving ever since we made the decision to build a new house.  The answer? It was right in the back of our truck.  Ratchet straps . This solution could also serve as a 'How To' for returning

Hello Fresh Complaints

Hello, my bloggy friends. I have a HelloFresh complaint and believe they are pulling a scam. Yours truly came *this close* to falling for it.  Maybe scam is too harsh of a word. Sneaky? You can decide for yourself. The fact that there are so many Hello Fresh complaints online does seem suspicious. My main complaint about Hello Fresh has to do with their promotional rate, which seems like it is set up to be intentionally misleading (more on this below). Despite so many people complaining about being charged more than they thought they'd agreed to, Hello Fresh maintains this as part of their business model and continues to mislead. So it's intentional, right? I do not recommend Hello Fresh. For starters, the service is just ingredients-by-mail with recipes, not meals. You can buy your own ingredients for much less, especially now that most grocery stores conveniently offer pickup and delivery. Excellent recipes are easy to find.  Click here for a list of top-rated, reader-favorit

Window Seat Idea - Dream Home Inspiration of the Day

See it? Waaay at the back of the photo?  I like how the window seat extends past the window all the way to the wall. How about you? If that's not your style, how about one of these lovely window seats? I'll seat you, my pretty, and your little dog too. How perfect would this be in a home office? I'd swap out that wimpy rug with a larger one.

My Instant Pot Explosion!

Like many new Instant Pot owners, I've wondered, How many Instant Pots have exploded?  (Eeek!) I'm happy to report that my research on Snopes and other sites has shown that these do not explode, at least not when used properly. There is a lawsuit between a woman in Texas and the Instant Pot manufacturer, but she admits she had thrown a towel over the steam vent. Do NOT do this.  Still concerned? Consider that on Prime Day of 2018, Amazon sold more than 300,000 Instant Pots. That's more than a quarter of a million sales in only 1 day! If these things were not safe, you would see news stories every day about someone being injured. Still, things can go wrong. We love our Instant Pot, the digital pressure cooker that seems to suddenly be in every home. You can't mess up - just throw in random ingredients and you'll get something yummy every time. It's foolproof. At least, that's how I used to feel about our Instant Pot, until the explosion... Inst

3 Minute Toaster/Convection Oven Smores

These are perfect when you're craving a quick, sugary treat. They work equally well in a toaster oven and a convection oven. Best of all, compared to eating an entire bag of Oreos (something I have never  done), they're quite healthy. What's that, you say? You already know how to make s'mores in the toaster oven? Well then, sit back and enjoy the ooey-gooey marshmallowy photos. (And if you're someone who works with me, please keep the "I've seen her polish off an entire bag of Oreo cookies" nonsense to yourself.)  Step 1: Put desired amount of graham crackers on a toaster oven/convection oven-safe pan.   Looks like it's time to clean this pan, Sexy Nerd Optional 1st step, which is Sexy Nerd's favorite: Spread peanut butter on each graham cracker (I'm not much of a peanut butter fan - WHAT?!? - so I skip this step.) Cover with yummy marshmallows. Top with chocolate chips. Place in the toaster o

Christmas Memes and More

Inspired by the popularity of my other memes posts, Funny Memes and Dog Memes , I have a new collection of memes for you to enjoy. I waste my life on the internet so you don't have to. Bookmark this post because I'll be adding to it as I find new memes for Xmas. Christmas Memes and More Fair warning that some of these are in poor taste. Isn't that usually the funniest meme?

Reuzel: Grooming Tonic Industry Review

I'm looking out for you, my bloggy friends. At my last haircut, the hairdresser shared his favorite hair product of all time, REUZEL (which I'd never heard of), with me and I had enough sense to get the details to share with you. He didn't even have a bottle of it to sell me. It was a genuine, honest review. Also, are they still called hairdressers? Is this the equivalent of calling your flight attendant a stewardess? Stylist? Barber? Reuzel  Grooming Tonic Review You know those men who have the softest, most perfect hair and it seems so unfair because most men don't even care about their hair? (Or so they say.) I think this is their secret. While you're here, be sure to read my  funny haircut story . Geez, I'm awkward. The fact that I was brave enough to ask to take this photo at the salon is proof I love my blog readers. Never heard of it? That's probably because Reuzel Grooming Tonic is marketed toward men. From reading their endless 5-star reviews, men