Shine OnDinner kits delivered to your door complete with measured, chilled, and cut ingredients
Feeling guilty about ordering in again?
Luckily, there are plenty of services now catering to our "make home-cooked meals" New Year's resolutions — if we don't mind spending the cash to make it happen.
Services like Plated, Blue Apron, Chefday! and HelloFresh deliver ready-to-be-assembled family dinners at busy households' doorsteps.
"Plated will buy, measure, cut, chill, box and ship every ingredient to your door. All the home cook has to do, in theory, is click on 'order,' open a box and follow a recipe," writes The New York Times' Julia Moskin. "This ready-to-cook meal is called the dinner kit."
No longer do busy moms and dads have to worry about grocery-shopping, recipe-selecting, or dinner-prep work.
"When we started jobs in New York, we realized that cooking dinner is really, really hard," Nick Taranto, founder of Plated, says of himself and his business partner, Josh Hix. "There’s not enough time in modern lives to recipe-select or grocery-shop."
Cooking from a kit doesn't come cheap — expect to spend between $7 and $17 a serving — but it does produce less waste. Portions are measured so that you receive only what you need for that meal, which means no longer will you find half a bag of cilantro rotting in the back of the fridge.
"Each dish was more expensive than it would be if made from scratch, but cheaper than in a restaurant. And the more you buy, the lower the prices can go, Moskin writes. "If you think of the dinner kit as an alternative to delivery or eating out, as the companies would like you to, the pricing makes more sense."
Moskin tested four company's dinner kits. Read about her experience here.
Busy Canadian households needn't feel left out. A similar service is already in Ontario.
Dinnerlicious drops off healthy ingredients — with accompanying recipes for three meals for four to six people — to households in areas including Hamilton, Burlington and Oakville.
"Many women have actually told me that for the first time their husbands and children are preparing meals — it is not that they didn’t want to before, but this has empowered them to do it," Dinnerlicious founder Malin van der Meer tells The Hamilton Spectator.
Van der Meer was inspired by her native country of Sweden, where similar ingredient-delivery services "revolutionized the way people eat," the Spectator reports.
Would prepped ingredients and a recipe dropped off at your doorstep make family dinners more likely at your household? Or have you mastered weekly meal plans on your own? Let us know in the comments below.
