Sun Basket is an organic, meal-kit delivery service. They send you all the farm fresh ingredients, and you cook the meals! My husband, Taylor, made pork loin with roasted red grapes and pear and chicory salad for us from one of the meal-kits, and it was delicious! He’s not a very experienced cook, so it shows that Sun Basket is do-able for both the novice and experienced chef alike! I was not paid to endorse Sun Basket, although I did receive 3 free meals kits in order to test them out and write a review! All thoughts and opinions are mine (and some of Taylor’s too!)
Friday, I told you about our first meal that I made from Sun Basket. It was Burmese Chicken Aloo with Japanese Sweet Potato, and I found the whole experience to be both easy and delicious. In order to experience what it would be like to use Sun Basket as a typical customer, I just made the recipe without stopping to take notes or photos, to see what making food from a kit was like practically. You can read about that here.
Today, I’ll share with you the second meal that we had, prepared solely by my husband, Taylor!
Pork Loin with Roasted Red Grapes and Pear and Chicory Salad
My second approach to the Sun Basket meals was to have Taylor cook the recipe without any direction. This was my way of finding out how it would work for someone who hasn’t cooked a lot before, and isn’t 100% comfortable in the kitchen. Taylor can cook, but he usually sticks to things like peanut butter sandwiches, spaghetti, and scrambled eggs.
I had him make the Pork Loin with Roasted Red Grapes and Pear and Chicory Salad.
All the ingredients we laid out for him, and I told him to read through the recipe card before starting, and then didn’t give him any more direction. He had to rely solely on the materials and instructions provided by Sun Basket. It was really fun and interesting watching how he did things differently than I would, but how the recipe turned out delicious anyway!
Here is Taylor, my dear sweet guinea pig getting ready to start making the most complex meal he’s made in years. Does he look nervous?
He didn’t waste any time, and got through the recipe really efficiently! He forgot to add the mint garnish until we had already started eating, and he forgot to salt and pepper the meat, but those were small things that didn’t hugely affect the finished product.
New Foods: Chicories, Persian cucumber
Old Foods New Ways: Red onions cut into rings roasted with red grapes and tossed with mint. This was the topping for the pork loin and it was SO good. I’d never roasted grapes before, and they tasted like warm grape jelly on top of the pork.
This cutting board was driving me crazy. I need a clear surface to chop on, but Taylor managed to chop everything for the whole recipe and keep it on his cutting board, segregated in their little spots.
Here he’s pouring oil onto the onions and red grapes before roasting them. There are a few super simple pantry items you need to have on hand for Sun Basket. Oil, salt, and pepper aren’t provided, but I’m guessing you already have those in your kitchen. He did forget to mix the mint with the roasted medley before he put it on the pork loin, but it still tasted great without it, and once we realized it was missing, it was easy to sprinkle on top.
After he put the onions and grapes in the oven, he seared the pork loin in a frying pan.
He plated the loin and the chicory salad that he had tossed with the vinaigrette. The chicory was so fun! The only way that we had ever tried it was in chicory coffee down in New Orleans. When we tasted it on it’s own, we were both really uncertain about how the salad would turn out. It had a really strong, bitter flavor. However, once it was mixed with the cucumber, pecans, pears and vinaigrette, it tasted great. It shows that the recipe developers at Sun Basket really know how to treat ingredients!
Here’s Taylor with his finished product! Plated and ready to eat!
Pork Loin topped with roasted grapes and onions (sans mint, but we added it later), and chicory salad with Persian cucumbers, pears, and pecans, tossed in a delicious mustard vinaigrette.
Taylor had some fun comments while he was cooking that I’ll share with you.
When he made this recipe, the ingredients had been with us for three days. He thought that “This onion is fresh. Really fresh! The pear is fresh and good.” (He loves pears.)
He was reading the next few steps of the recipe and started adding his own steps. “then put the mint in the mojito! Ha! I didn’t know you used it for other stuff, maybe in toothpaste.” Thank you, Sun Basket, for opening Taylor’s eyes to the fact that mint has more applications than just mojitos and toothpaste. 😉
When I asked him what he thought the difficulty level was he said, “This is easy! This is like cooking by numbers.”
It really does feel a bit like cooking by numbers. The prep works is all in yellow lettering, and the actual cooking steps are in black lettering. And they list all the steps chronologically, so that if you just follow each step with the next, you should end up with a healthy, well balanced meal, in roughly 30 minutes!
It took Taylor about 40 minutes from start to finish, but I made him stop several times to take photos.
If he can enjoy making delicious healthy Sun Basket meals, you can too!
The meals at Sun Basket cost $11.49 per person, the ingredients are fresh, organic when possible, and the meats are all hormone and antibiotic free. They work a lot with small farms to support local agriculture and get us the healthiest ingredients possible!
They’re not serving every US state yet, but CA, OR, WA, NV, CO, ID, AZ and UT are all in their current delivery range!
Head over to the Sun Basket Homepage to learn more about them, and get $30 off your first basket when you sign up!
Thanks for reading 🙂
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Great review!