Meal in a box delivery services promise to simplify dinner time

No more meal planning or grocery shopping sounds great, right? Now, there are services that promise to simplify dinner time.

But so many of these services now available, how do they compare? How much do they cost and how do they really work?

Dana Tenuto is a full-time working mom and travels a lot for her job.

"It's difficult. It's constant going and going," she said.

Which makes a meal in a box delivery service pretty appealing.

"It would just be easier for everything to be in one place," she said.

The services have various recipe plans, but they all work pretty much the same way.

They come up with their own recipes, then send you a weekly box to your door with all the pre-measured, perfectly proportioned ingredients for the recipes you chose.

Shipping is free and they say you can skip a delivery or cancel anytime.

Tenuto chooses the plan that makes 3 meals for two people per week. And for each service, she chooses the non-vegetarian option.

Blue Apron is $9.99 per meal, for a total of $59,94 per week.

And she gets to choose among four options. Dana chooses Turkey kibbeh, hake, which is like a cod, and pasta with peas and peccorino cheese.

Hello Fresh offers 5 choices for $10.75 per meal. For a total of $69 a week, Tenuto chooses pork , argentine-spiced steak, and a creamy pea and asparagus risotto.

Plated offers 9 choices at $12 per meal for a total of $72 a week.

Tenuto also chooses steak fajitas, cod and the chicken tostadas recipe from Plated.

And before you choose your recipes, you can see the number of calories, degree of difficulty to make and prep time.

Once you go through the initial sign-up process, delivery to your door each week thereafter is pretty much automatic. You can even have the services choose recipes for you in the future based on your preferences.

So which one was the easiest to use? Tenuto says: "I would have to say Plated so far. And it gave the most options so you had 9 options to choose from."

Remember, though, Plated is the most expensive at $72 a week for six meals.

"You're getting three meals for $72 when a family like us - we go out a lot, so I think we're going to be saving money in the long run," said Tenuto.

We're going to check back in with Tenuto on Wednesday to see how easy the recipes are to follow, how fresh the ingredients are, and to see how the meals taste.