Teaching an old water boiler to cook

One typically hesitates to mention one’s own deficiencies, but in this product review I’ll make an exception.

Truth is… I never learned to cook for squat. To me, hunger has always been simply a problem to be solved as nutritiously yet expeditiously as possible so that I might get on with other things. Always admired men who could cook, and enjoyed many a meal when my buddy Frank Jones was still in the restaurant business.

Much of my resistance to learning the culinary art, I’d say, had to do with the planning of a nice meal: choosing a recipe, procuring the ingredients, only then getting around to actually cooking the dish. Learning the secrets of good meal planning and cooking takes a certain amount of initiative that I apparently lacked. And so, left to my own devices, I’ll opt for deli goods, basic sandwiches, making the occasional spaghetti dinner, tossing a salad, etc.

And Rhonda, bless her heart, has skills in cooking but very little time to mess with it, what with her busy schedule. To remedy this conundrum for us, she recently signed up for an interesting online service called Hello Fresh, and we took delivery of our first parcel last week. We’ve since cooked up our first three HF meals, enjoyed our successes in the kitchen… and we’ve had a lot of fun playing in the kitchen together.

Hello Fresh is basically a recipe and fresh meat/produce provider. A subscriber gets quality ingredients from reputable, health-savvy farms, plus the recipes for very appealing dishes shipped in sturdy, insulated chilled boxes once a week (they use large-size reusable ice packs to keep things nice and cold in-transit… those will come in handy this summer when we take the cooler out on the boat). Every ingredient is pre-measured precisely, so there’s zero waste.

The freshness and quality is worth mentioning again. So far, we’ve not seen a single piece of meat, vegetable or side ingredient that was anything less than pristine. You can review their suppliers here.

Our first three meals (enough to feed two people) were:

• Tater-Topped Pot Pie
with Chicken, Mushrooms, and Peas
• Butter-Basted Sirloin Steak
with Parsnip Wedges and Creamed Spinach
• Sweet ’N’ Smoky Pork Chops
with Sweet Potato Wedges and a Brussels Sprout Hash

We found the recipes, printed on large glossy cards, quite easy to follow, and with the exception that I salted the spinach a little too much on the steak dinner (thankfully, not exceedingly so), our joint cooking venture produced three excellent, thoroughly delicious dinners for us to enjoy. Each meal took only about an hour, start to finish (including cleanup). Not bad at all.

Cost-wise, Hello Fresh is quite reasonable. Our weekly subscription is $60 for three two-person dinners (that pencils out to $10 per meal, shipping is free). If we went out to eat and ordered meals of comparable quality, plus beverages, tips, etc… we’d easily spend twice that.

I have to say, it’s pretty handy to have nutritious, well-planned recipes AND all the necessary ingredients at your fingertips (we provide any required salt, pepper, butter and oil). To my mind, Hello Fresh is taking all the drudgery of meal planning and provisioning out of your hands, leaving you with the fun, creative part — cooking it all up and enjoying a meal, hot off the stove.

And when I stop and think about it — the added benefits to me of spending quality time with wifey and actually learning the art of cooking one meal at a time is priceless.

You know, most folks I know are pretty darn busy these days. Even an old homesteading guitar player like me who hasn’t worked a real job since 1981 is constantly on the go keeping up with current events, home improvements and being a small-time entrepreneur. It’s easy to see why programs like Hello Fresh are filling a void in our busy lives by providing a very basic service that makes life easier.