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A review of a different kind of meal kit from Pinoy Heritage. It's a perfectly portioned healthy Filipino 6 course meal that you can cook at home in under an hour.
I don't normally do reviews here, but my experience with this meal kit just had to be documented. Not only did the meals come out perfectly, but they also look so damn vibrant and healthy. For the past month we have been cooking non-stop and I know it's very privileged of me to say this, but it's gone to the point where I am burnt out. Not knowing what to make and really just super facking tired.
When Pinoy Heritage came out with this meal kit I looked at it longingly via Instagram. Then this week they announced they were delivering all the way to the East Bay. Even to my area in Walnut Creek, if I just paid an extra delivery fee. I said no worries to that.
To get the kit all you have to do is fill out the google form here and then pay for the kit and delivery fee via venmo. They do all deliveries on Friday afternoon starting at 1.30pm. I think mine came at around 3.30pm. We still had some food leftover from another meal so I decided to wait till the next day to cook it for lunch. Also they give you a bag of rice to cook for the fried rice, so I would recommend cooking that the day before anyway so that the rice is nice and cool.
They have two kits available one with meat and one vegetarian. I picked the vegetarian option.
Pinoy Heritage Vegetarian Kit Menu
So you have 5 meals that you do have to cook yourself, but not so much cooking. Some light frying and heating up of sauces. It took me 45 minutes to cook all 5 meals. This was the menu.
Lumpia Salad
The cooking component here was just to fry up the lumpia. It comes vacuum sealed and you fry it from frozen, so when you get the kit the first thing you do is to put the lumpia in the freezer. I cooked mine in the airfryer and then lightly fried it before serving.
The salad came ready in a bag and all you had to do was put that in a bowl and dress it with the salad dressing and top it off with the chopped lumpia pieces.
Ginataang Vegetables
The second item was spring vegetables in a rich savory coconut sauce. To cook, just saute the veggies for about 7-10 minutes in a pan with oil and season with salt and pepper. In a separate small pan heat up the sauce until bubbly.
To serve just put the cooked veggies in a bowl and top with the coconut sauce and palapa crunchy condiment. You have the option to have this with half the plain rice you cooked.
Mushroom Sisig Fried Rice
Okay, this was the favorite.
I don't know what they put in the sisig sauce, but it was so darn good. Again light cooking is involved. This probably took me about 10 minutes to make as you just lightly fry the rice with garlic and oil then add in the sisig sauces and cook through. The egg they provided is already poached so all you need to do is warm it up in hot water for 5 minutes. To serve top with the chopped shallots and pickled onions and the poached egg. To get the egg out I cracked open just one end and poured it on the rice. It just plopped right out.
Afritada Pasta with Spring Veggies
This was Abby's favorite.
The veggies are already chopped and ready and all you need to do for this meal is lightly fry the veggies, heat up the sauce and cook the pasta. Again this was a 10 minute thing. The cheese was a nice way to top it off.
Handmade Pancit with Veggies
These handmade noodles was insane.
If you are in to textures and know what QQ means, these noodles have the perfect bounce in the teeth. I have to say they perfected the saucing per portion. It was neither over or under - it was just perfectly balanced. Again this was a quick stir-fry of the veggies while the fresh noodles cooked for just a few minutes. Then you bring it all together for a light fry and boom done.
The kit does come with a dessert and mine came with a Blueberry Apple Cake with Calamansi Marmalade. That didn't even make it for lunch as I had it the night before as a snack. So no photo of that unfortunately.
If you are in the Bay Area and can't think of what to cook, but still want something healthy and filling I would highly recommend getting this kit. Also if you are a little on edge about getting a full take out meal, you have more control here by making the food yourself and wiping down all the bags of sauces beforehand.
I have a family of omnivores and they didn't even miss the meat. I would say for a family of 4, if you made all the dishes at once like I did it makes for a great meal. Because it is cook it yourself, you have the luxury of just making one dish at a time as well.
You can grab an Omnivore or Vegetarian Pinoy Heritage Meal kit here for next week's delivery.
