An Ongoing Food Adventure

I normally blog about activity but since I’m not exactly active right now and don’t want to talk about it (grumble), I thought I’d talk about an interesting food experiment I’ve been engaged with this last year.

I looooove food, I loooooove cooking and I haaaate grocery shopping. I also hate having to decide what I’m making, although once I do decide, I seriously enjoy the process. I am conscious, also, as many of us who write on here are, of what I am putting in my mouth and the mouths of the family for whom I am responsible food wise. I want fresh, tasty, nutritious, fun and interesting food on the table. It is my belief that if it meets those criteria most of the time, then the other looming adjective that I ignored  (“healthy”, whatever that means, I just seriously can’t stomach defining that any more, pun intended) just kind of follows along for the most part. I also like the idea of eating less meat even though I love meat.

I was intrigued through my good friend by a service that delivers meals weekly to my house. These meals are not pre-prepared. I have to do the prep and cook them. However, they are pre-measured and contain only what is required to cook the meal. I’m not going to name the company here but you can look the services up easily. There are a few now. I order three meals per week and they are meant to feed two people per meal. The servings are usually generous so we often have left overs for another meal or two out of it.

Here is my evaluation of the experiment. Total success.

Things I love are as follows:

For the most part, they are totally tasty and satisfying. I love that I don’t have to go to the grocery store as much. I love that I don’t have to think of what to cook. They give these lovely instructions with each meal and the description of the food just makes you want to eat it that second.

Vegetarian Pad Thai

With its familiar mountain of rice noodles, Pad Thai is probably the most popular and recognizable Thai dish the world over. Our vegetarian version is bursting with perfectly seasoned cubes of tofu, cashews, bell peppers and edamame. Tossed in a Sriracha-spiked sauce, our well-balanced twist on a beloved classic won’t disappoint.

That isn’t even the best description. It’s just the one I have in front of me. They never ever talk about calories, or “light” meals, or low fat or any of that crap. “Well balanced” here is talking about taste. The taste is well balanced. It totally is.

I have acquired new skills through this process and an appreciation of prep work that accelerates the cooking. Most meals take a half hour to prepare. I also never knew how important vegetarian demi-glace could be, nor did I realize that lemon or lime zest is, like, EVERYTHING.

The down sides include too much grilled tofu. I don’t care how long you marinate it, it’s boring as a main protein. I have also forgotten how to cook otherwise, lol, just kidding, sort of.

Enjoying food is joy. This is a total win.