This creamy mushroom chicken breast did not taste like I cooked it, even though I definitely did. It tasted like my mom cooked it. But the only mom actually involved was the mother of all Yankees, Martha Stewart. I had simmered up my chicken with the help of a Marley Spoon meal kit.

Marley Spoon isn’t quite Martha Stewart’s meal kit: It was founded in Germany. But it isn’t not Martha Stewart’s meal kit, either. Stewart endorses the brand heartily on the Marley Spoon website, many of the early recipes and techniques for the United States rollout came from her larder, and the creamy mushroom chicken in particular was tagged as one of “Martha’s Best.” (The recipe was devised, in fact, by a food author and prolific recipe developer named Anna Painter.)

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The mushroom chicken was the sort of recipe I’d usually never think to make: vaguely but not at all Hungarian, with crispity chicken bits deglazed into a Dijon-paprika chicken broth and fattened up with cream cheese. As the final step, I mashed up the plate’s bed of potatoes with a wealth of spinach. It was delicious in a way that reminded me of the generation of foods I’d grown up with: gentle, rich, tangy, earthy, yet no spicier than ripe garlic. It felt a little like home.

I worked as a food critic on two coasts for more than a decade, and I can be a harsh judge and skeptic of meal kit cuisine. But after days of cooking nothing but Marley Spoon dinners, I’ve come away feeling that Marley Spoon is the closest I’ve found to what a meal kit is supposed to offer—at least, if you truly enjoy preparing a meal.

Most of my meals from Marley Spoon have been fully realized, homestyle plates that take me just a little outside my usual repertoire. Meals that maybe teach me a little something, but still don’t take more than an hour to make.

The price is toward the top end of the meal kit world, about $9 to $13 a regular serving (with both premium and “saver” meals available), and $11 in shipping. In my experience, it bears out the price, but Marley Spoon also has a budget option called Dinnerly with simpler plates, at around two-thirds the price.

Hello, Fresh

When I placed my initial order on Marley Spoon’s website, I did what I always do when I test meal kits. I allowed the website to choose my plates for me, throwing myself on the mercy of the brand’s algorithm. The path of least resistance is perhaps also the path to honesty.

The result turned out to be a hearty and familiar assortment: the aforementioned creamy chicken, but also cashew chicken over rice, a hearty lentil-sausage-kale soup, carnitas tostadas, eggplant parm, and Cajun tilapia with broccoli. (Though the picture on this last recipe card showed broccolini instead, which kinda made me want the broccolini I didn’t have in my box.)