My Experience with Chef Ami Tampa

Tampa friends: scroll down for a coupon code!

I know exactly what I’d do if I had extra time on my hands. I’d read. I’d sit on the couch and I’d read this book that I’ve been “reading” for entirely too long because I just don’t have relaxation time. Leisure time significantly decreased once I had kids. Who else goes through the motions of laundry, dishes, picking up around the house, cleaning, and then hastily making dinner because you couldn’t get it together to meal plan or defrost chicken or any number of things that make it just a little harder to get dinner done?

I’m right there with you and I run this food blog. Dinner is by far the hardest part of my day because I don’t prepare for it the way I should and I frequently don’t have the time to get my mise en place together.

(Mise en place: “everything in its place”, meaning everything I need for the recipe is chopped, measured, etc before I even start cooking)

How great would it be to be able to just cook dinner? What a concept. To not have to forage in your pantry and fridge for all the ingredients you need. To not have to get out your measuring cups and spoons just to realize that the one you need most is dirty in the sink and has to be washed. To not have to dig through your spice cabinet for everything you need.

If you’re in the Tampa Bay area, and what I’m saying resonates with you, I really think you should check out Chef Ami (Tampa’s only meal kit delivery service). I had the very fortunate opportunity to try out one of their meal kit delivery boxes and I was very pleased with the results. First, let me tell you a little bit about Chef Ami that I was personally impressed by before I even started cooking.

1. Chef Ami works with local farmers. I am so about this! They’ll get the seasonal produce fresh from these farms for use in your delivered box. Whenever possible, they also use organic ingredients, including all-natural chicken, grass fed and finished angus beef (check out: What does grass-finished mean? Hint: I’m a big fan of this method), and sustainably sourced seafood.
2. Packaging is reusable. Because the environment is important too!
3. The meals are designed to be cooked in about 30 minutes. This is wonderful because while a recipe you may find online can take 30 minutes, that normally doesn’t include the prep time and, like I mentioned before, the time it takes to gather all of the ingredients before you even turn on the stove.
4. Chef Ami is family owned and operated. Scroll down for more information on this!

I cooked the three recipes I received over the course of a handful of days and here are my thoughts!

By the way, if you look at the “Chef Ami” highlighted story on my Instagram profile, you can follow along as I unbox the meal kit and cook through the recipes!

Three Cheese Tortellini with Italian Sausage, Fennel, and Mushrooms

Thoughts:

• Delicious. Our favorite dish of the three!
• VERY simple to make
• Family-friendly
• A great way to cook fennel (and I normally do not enjoy fennel)
• Love the color in this dish
• Yielded a lot of food!

Poached Cod with Lemon Herb Broth

Thoughts:

• Made me rethink eating fish (I normally only eat shellfish)
• Made me rethink how I cook basic rice (Chef Ami instructed me to add olive oil and salt to the rice and water before cooking)
• I may poach more things because it was such a simple and fast cooking method.
• The lemon broth gave me life. So good!
• I felt both healthy and indulgent while eating, which is a fantastic combination.

Creamy Pesto Chicken Pitas with Sweet Potato Wedges

Thoughts:

• Chicken portion was more than what fit in the two pitas, which meant leftovers and I was a happy gal!
• Loved the creamy pesto versus more traditional non-creamy pestos.
• Family-friendly
• My two year old son Max ate the majority of the sweet potato fries.
• Arugula is a nice, peppery touch.
• This one took the longest amount of time and we were still under 30 minutes.

So here’s how it works: Chef Ami has a menu posted online ahead of time and you know what you’re getting. If you sign up, you can skip weeks or choose to have your meals delivered. Your box will arrive with everything measured out and separated for you, along with recipe cards, to ease that prep time in the kitchen.

What I absolutely loved about Chef Ami is that the box had three bags in it, with one bag being for each recipe that I’d be making. I’ve tried other meal kit delivery programs and the thing that drives me crazy is when the items are all thrown together in the box so that you have to sort through, put everything away, and then gather it all up again when you’re ready to cook. With Chef Ami, I just transferred my bags of ingredients for each meal straight into the fridge and then I only had to take out the bag and the protein (originally packaged outside of the bag – but still in the same box – and on top of ice gel packs) and get to cooking. I also used the bag as my trash bag as I cooked!

It’s so simple and so are the recipes. I think for all the recipes I used the same pan and then I used a pot to cook the rice in and another one to cook the tortellini is. That’s it! Nothing fancy and I didn’t have a pile of dishes to be done after dinner. You know what that meant? That meant I could get back some time in my day to read that book before bed and that’s a leisurely activity for me that I miss doing daily.

I was very impressed with the quality of the meal given how simple everything was. The recipes were absolutely delicious and loved by myself, my husband and our son. 🙂

Coupon code to try Chef Ami

Want to try Chef Ami for yourself? You have my complete support and encouragement. Until June 1, use coupon code PATOOTIE and get 50% off your first box! Totally worth it, if only to try it out and see what you think. I guarantee you can’t even get a grocery list together for six meals for that price, and you definitely can’t go out to eat six meals for that price either. You have nothing to lose! Again, you can skip any week and cancel any time. Chef Ami doesn’t come with stipulations or contracts.

More about Chef Ami

About that family owned and operated thing. I took the chance to ask Elijah, one of the owners (Chef Ami is operated by Elijah, his brother, and his brother’s wife), about the Chef Ami concept.

How did you come up with the idea of Chef Ami?

My brother and his wife had the idea four years ago when they founded the original Chef Ami in Gainesville. They wanted to stop eating out so often, and were tired of cooking the same boring recipes at home, which were unhealthy most of the time too. They found it almost impossible to make time to research new recipes, check all the ingredients in the kitchen against what they need, go to three different grocery stores looking for specialty ingredients, etc. etc. They just cooked for convenience, which is rarely healthy. Not to mention, going to the grocery store after work is always a nightmare with the crowds, or those times you forget just one item and have to go back two or three times a week!

The idea came when they were watching a cooking program and commenting to each other, I think everyone who has ever watched a cooking show has made this comment actually, something like “this is so much more difficult than they make it look! It’s so unfair they have all the ingredients just ready to throw in the pot”. And that’s the basic idea. Make home cooking as easy as a cooking show, save time and hassle looking for recipes and buying ingredients, and you don’t end up with a whole bottle or packet of some exotic ingredient you won’t use again for months sitting in your pantry, or that guilty feeling as you watch veggies go bad in the refrigerator, because you had to buy a bundle but you only needed a few. 

Why the Tampa Bay Area?

We’re born and raised Floridians, we love the water, and we are foodies, especially for fresh seafood. I think of Tampa as having the most refined foodie culture in Florida.

Tell me more about the business and how everything works!

My father creates our graphic designs for advertisements, he created our logo, and everything else like that. My mother oversees packing the meals every week and does a great job networking and finding new customers. My brother and his wife develop the recipes and handle everything related to administration. Their 2 year old daughter taste-tests the ingredients and throws them on the ground when they aren’t up to her standards. I’m developing the Tampa market.

They take inspiration from bloggers, cooking shows, cook books, restaurants, and Pinterest. They generally combine ideas from 2 or 3 different recipes, and cook them multiple times, tweaking them along the way. They typically cook a recipe 4-5 times before deciding it is good enough to send to customers. Other services have up to 50 recipes to choose from, every single week. We talked to a lot of those customers, and found one common theme: it was like searching for a diamond in the rough trying to find a truly great recipe in that wide selection, a recipe you want to cook again, a recipe that becomes a family favorite. We only offer 3 recipes every week, because we truly strive to make every single one of them one of those family favorites. And from our customers’ feedback, we’ve been a success. Our best customers are people who currently use another service, they always comment on this. I got an email from a couple recently telling me that they actually go to the store and buy ingredients enough to cook double of every Chef Ami meal just so that they can eat it for lunch every day too!

What are your favorite recipes to come from Chef Ami so far?

My brother’s favorite is the Blackened Grouper Sandwich with Cucumber Caprese Salad, his wife loves the Shrimp and Baby Bok Choy Ramen Noodle Soup. My personal favorite is the Coconut Island Tenderloin.

Anything else readers should know?

I think that what really sets us apart from the national brands is that we are a local business. We do our best to source as many ingredients as we can from local farms, which not only means that our product is significantly fresher than when you get it shipped in from California, but it also means that we are a part of the local community and I think that translates into our customer service as well. Finally, for those that care about the environment, it’s a no-brainer. National delivery is a huge negative footprint, and we are the only service which actually picks up all of our packaging and reuses it. Every other company just has you throw that whole box, all the foam insulation, and those big plastic ice packs right in the garbage. We reuse that insulation and those ice packs over and over again, and we recently developed a method that will allow us to also reuse the cardboard boxes as well, at least twice.

Also, we work with the charity group Feeding Tampa Bay, and we donate a meal to that organization for every meal that we sell.

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So impressive and I’m thrilled that a company like this exists in my own backyard. If you try out Chef Ami, please let me know what you think!

Chef Ami can be found on: Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest

Chef Ami provided me with a meal kit box to try for this post. As always, all opinions and experiences are 100% my own and not influenced by a blogger/brand relationship.