What is Purple Carrot?

Last year, I started ordering easy vegan dinner kits from Purple Carrot, a plant-based meal delivery service I’d seen online. Saul and I both really enjoyed the recipes (so much so, that I included a Purple Carrot subscription in my holiday gift guide!) We and used their meal prep kits a few nights a week for about six months. They are fantastic when I have 30-60 minutes to follow a recipe and use the ingredients they send. Lately, our schedules have been busier, so we tried Purple Carrot’s newer prepared meals, which store easily in the fridge and take just two minutes to heat up!

My plant-based journey

I’ve been a vegetarian for about three years. It actually started out unintentionally! I traveled a lot and most of the produce I bought went to waste. I’d come home from a trip, and realize that either I didn’t have any food or that my food I had an expired. On one of these occasions, I noticed a package of tofu in the back of my fridge, so I prepared it with some frozen vegetables. I ate vegetarian meals out of convenience, until one day I realized that it had been more than a month since I’d eaten meat, and I didn’t miss it at all. After following some social media accounts for recipe inspiration, I realized how eating this way could be more sustainable for the planet. Especially since my lifestyle includes a lot of jet travel, I figured eating more vegetables and less animal products could be a good way for me to minimize my carbon footprint, and became an intentional vegetarian.

About a year later, a friend of mine decided that she’d like to try eating vegan one day a week. She pulled together a group of seven women in a WhatsApp chat group. We each selected a day to eat entirely vegan, so the collective impact would be as if one person in the world had gone fully vegan. It might sound small, the environmental impact that just one person can have is impressive. Once I started eating that way once a week, it was quite common to go for several days and not realize that I was eating almost entirely plant-based. My husband, on the other hand, was harder to convince. With a Spanish mom and Mexican dad, Saul grew up basically thinking ham was its own food group. Still, he was willing to try vegan options when I prepared them, especially if the taste and texture were exciting enough. Enter: Purple Carrot. Their meal kits offer a variety of international easy vegan dinner recipes that we both thoroughly enjoy. We wondered if the refrigerated heat and eat options would compare.

Purple Carrot Prepared Meals

Each Purple Carrot prepared meal comes with a main dish and a side, which we found to be tasty and filling. There are 15 single-serving meal options to choose from every week (check out this week’s menu here). We ordered six of them to try. Saul’s favorite meal was the Elote-Style Corn with Cuban Black Beans & Brown Rice, which is high praise coming from someone who grew up in Mexico! My favorite dish also was corn-based. The Pesto Corn Skillet with Herbed Orzo & White Beans was delicious! My second favorite waa the Italian Pasta Bowl with Pesto Cream & Tuscan Braised Kale. The Thai Noodles with Peanut Sauce & Ginger Vegetable Stir-Fry were tasty, as well. My least favorite item was the Seitan Cabbage Stir-Fry with Sesame Orange Sauce & Brown Rice. The taste was good, but I really wished the seitan would have been crispier. The sixth and final meal was the Mac n’ Cheese with Cauliflower Cream Sauce & Truffled Mushrooms. The truffled mushrooms on the side were very truffley – too much for me. If you like truffles, this is for you!

Would I order again?

Overall, we were very pleased with Purple Carrot’s prepared meals. They tasted good, filled us up with healthy ingredients, and took literally just two minutes to prepare. While cooking with local ingredients will always be less expensive and more sustainable, Purple Carrot’s prepared meals are the perfect easy vegan dinner! We will surely order them again for weeks where we know we won’t make time to meal prep and would otherwise be tempted to make unhealthy, expensive delivery choices. If you’re interested in trying delicious, healthy, easy, plant-based meals, just click this link to try them out for yourself. Plus, get $30 off your first box with code CARROT30!

I was compensated for this post. This post also contains affiliate links. I will receive a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on my links. However, this is my honest review, and you’re by no means obligated to use my links. If you do, muchas gracias for your support!