Adventurous, delicious recipes with excellent culinary technique. Offers both meal kits and ready-to-eat premade meals. Doesn’t over-rely on soy.

The meals I made with vegan meal kit Purple Carrot include some of the best-tasting food I've made with any meal delivery service. This is no small statement. I'm an omnivore and longtime food critic who’s tested pretty much every meal delivery service in existence over the past two years.

And so when I say Purple Carrot offers good cooking, I'm not grading on a curve. Purple Carrot's pecan-topped, five-spice butternut squash dumplings were among the most extravagant meals I made for myself during that entire month. The prep was extensive, more than I'd usually attempt on any but a weekend evening, but the results were both healthful and a rival to excellent bistro fare.

Purple Carrot achieves this on its meal kit recipes while avoiding the pitfalls endemic to vegan fare—namely, an over-reliance on soy or cashew substitutes. Purple Carrot, thank God, loves a vegetable. It loves a fruit. And it loves an herb. While Purple doesn't offer a huge menu each week, and I was less enthralled by microwave meal options that resorted more often to hunks of seitan, the meal kit choices are both broad and appetizing.

Purple Carrot manages to deliver the classic promise of a meal kit—sweet relief from the same staid recipes I bore myself with when I'm out of ideas. It does so better than most meal kits that cater to meat-eaters. It was my colleague Molly Higgins' favorite plant-based meal kit of the dozen or so she tested last year. After testing five meals and a number of market add-ons this year, I rank it among my favorites overall.