I first heard of this new concept in preparing meals on the Food Network show “Recipe for Success”, a series that deals with starting new food businesses. The concept is that you show up at a store, combine raw ingredients to make eight to twelve meals feeding about six people. I showed up on Saturday morning and put together the following meals:
It took me about 1½ - 2 hours to prepare the meals, bag them, and get them into the cooler to take home and freeze till I’m ready to cook them. I really like this concept, because I’m horrible about menu planning, eating a variety of foods and not relying on fast food places when I’m hungry. The recipes used fresh foods, the meat looked appetizing and I got easy cooking instructions and easy side dishes I’ll have no problem handling. It also looks like this will solve my work lunch problem as well – now I can take appetizing leftovers to work instead of constantly buying my lunch. So, what do you Dopers think of this?
I’ve never heard of it, being the wrong side of the pond, but I’m intrigued.
Can you give a bit more explanation: Is it a specialist store? Do you get a table of raw ingredients provided at the store? Do they provide cooking implements? How much do you pay? What does it have to do with “new food businesses”- or is “Let’s Dish” the store itself?
Let’s see, it’s almost like a cooking class, except you do the cooking at home. There are about ten prep stations in the store and each one is stocked with the ingredients needed to prepare a particular dish. You follow a recipe that instructs you to combine the raw ingredients of the meal you wanted (such as the Asian Barbecue Pork Wraps) in freezer bags that you bring home and store in your freezer. When it comes time to cook a meal, you must remove a bag from the freezer and let the ingredients defrost in the refrigerator. Then, you follow the cooking instructions and you only have to prepare side dishes from scratch, such as tossed salads and/or vegetable sides. “Let’s Dish” is the store itself–the concept of having people come in and put together “meal kits”. Since I’m single, I bought the package of eight meals for $162.00 plus tax, about $168.00. All of the meals looked appealing to me, and there was plenty of room in the freezer to accomodate all of the packages. I’ll be cooking the meals in the next few weeks, so I’ll report back on the taste of each meal.
I have heard of this, but when I looked into it in my area, there were actually waiting lists to sign up for it. I would be interested to see how this turns out. Let us know how they taste.
There are several companies around the country trying this business model. The target market seems to be the working mother who wants her family to eat better. For you, as a single person, I wonder about the economics of it. You said you bought eight meals for $162, which comes to about twenty bucks a meal. How many portions do you expect to get out of that? If it’s only a couple, it sounds expensive.
This is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard! THEY EVEN PROVIDE CONTAINERS!!!
pant, pant
Seems like you do the chopping, mixing and assembling at the store, then bring them home and refrigerate or freeze them. When you’re ready to “cook”, all the prepwork is done - you just do the heating part! It’s like OAMC, but I don’t have to figure out the recipes or make flowcharts of when to chop what! I’m seriously geeking out, here.
They say they’re “coming soon” to Illinois. I can’t wait!
[buzzkill]Of course…they don’t seem to have prices on their website. :dubious: [/buzzkill]
As I said, there are other companies doing the same thing. Dream Dinners, for example, which has a location in Naperville. Is that anywhere near you? And Super Suppers has five locations in the state.
We’ve got lots of those places around here: Cooking Thyme, Suddenly Supper or Simply Supper or something like that, and a third one. Some friends have gone and done it, and love it, but it’s a bit pricey for me. Many of the meals are heavy on rice and pasta, which I can no longer eat, and the recipes just didn’t appeal to me…didn’t sound like anything I’d want to order in a restaurant. Plus I no longer feed a family, so it’s just not practical.
As a business, it seems that it’s the kind of business that appeals to stressed-out over-achieving soccer moms, who think they are going to have more of a home life by starting one of these places, and then discover they are working harder than ever. Or so it seems from the profiles of the owners that get written up in the paper from time to time. And the one place I drive by a lot…ah, Simply Done Dinners, that’s it! is always empty and closed…but I guess I just don’t drive by when they are having a session.
Lillith Fair has tried one of those places, splitting the cost and the meals with a friend, and she loves it. but she also hates to cook, so it’s perfect for her. If I had her kitchen all to myself you’d never get me out of it (except to knit, and sew, and read, that is!)
My ex and her sister just went to one last week and they loved it. They are pretty busy and don’t like to cook as much as I do so for them it works well.
My roommate told me about it and he thought it was a marvelous business idea he’d like to try.
After I stopped laughing and picked myself off the floor, I reminded him that last time he cleaned the kitchen was… I dunno… NEVER?!? And you want a business where other people mess up your kitchen and you have to clean it???
The literature says that you get about 6 portions per meal, so that works out to be about $3.75 - $4.00 a meal. It’s a little more reasonable, but I like it because all of the prepwork was done, letting me combing the ingredients.
The “containers” they provide are merely freezer bags. There’s no chopping, you just add the ingredients to the freezer bags. But your post is the main reason I tried this out. My usual modus operandi is to buy fresh vegetables and then let them rot because I’m too tired to cook when I come home from work. I buy chicken, beef and pork and stick them in the freezer until I can come up with a recipe I’d like to try and I can count on forgetting a couple of key ingredients. I like that “Let’s Dish” figured out the menu planning, ingredient prepwork and recipe guidelines. If someone enterprising writes a cookbook that emulates this model, I’ll buy it!
medstar, you might be interested in Once A Month Cooking (OAMC). It’s a cooking plan wherein you make several meals (the title, of course, being from meals for a whole month, but some people do two weeks if they don’t have freezer space) all in one full daylong cookingfest (after which you go out to dinner, 'cause you’re sick of being in the kitchen!) and freeze the meals for later use. There are cookbooks written around this concept with grocery lists and menus. There are also websites where you can “click” a dozen meals and download software to write your shopping list and help you organize some of the meal prep.
I’ve been meaning to sit down and do it. So far, I’ve managed to get about 14 meals in the freezer simply by making extra servings of our normal dinners. That was a lifesaver when I did a 10 day fast last month - I “cooked” for the family by heating stuff up and tossing a salad their way while sipping my lemonade. :pukey
How funny that this thread popped up because I just participated in one last night! The one I did here in Virginia is called Dinner Done . My friend booked a “private party” so it was 9 of us that already knew each other. It was a blast to prepare and I really learned a lot, too. Plus I get to try dishes with some ingredients that I’m either too cheap to spend for myself (like saffron) or that I’d never buy because it would never get used enough to justify the cost. I chose a good balance of beef, pork, fish, and chicken. Some of the dishes will only feed the three of us, but I swear there are a few that I could host a dinner party and feed at least 6-8.
I own my own business and my husband works full time, so finding a balance of eating together at home but not spending every free second preparing tonight and the next night’s meal is getting more difficult, so my hope is that this will alleviate that madness at least a few times a week for us. My friend that hosted the session has done it several times before and says she has not had a bad meal from them yet.
What’s the difference between doing the same thing in your own kitchen, probably cheaper? I’ve been doing that for years (preparing meals and storing in portion containers), and I don’t have to go anywhere special to do it.
If the recipies are so great, why not take those with you and the next time do it at home?
Well, there is no difference because you’re doing the same thing. Except I’m the kind of person where preparing 8-12 meals for my family, labeling them, and storing them in neat, reusable aluminum containers in a 2-hour period on a weeknight is akin to the Second Coming. Anyone can pre-prep meals and freeze them, but to have it all done for you – veggies chopped, meat prepared, spices set out and ready, cooking directions printed on the label makes the feat actually doable for someone like me.
And you absolutely can do the recipes at home. I have a few that I’m already eager to put in my recipe notebook to make for myself in the future. Plus now I know a few tricks to make things run smoother so this can get done more quickly should I choose to attempt it at home.
This is certainly not for everyone, and you can definitely weigh the pros and cons. If you can prepare that many meals ahead of time and freeze them for your family, hey you’re a better person than me. But for the rest of us this is a good option so there are less nights out in restaurants, maybe a few more free hours at home in the evening, less general chaos getting dinner on the table at a decent hour.
I can think of three other reasons it appeals to me:
It turns meal prep into a social thing. I’d rather pick and choose and prepare (whether or not I do my own chopping) meals while gabbing with a friend than all alone in my kitchen. YMMV.
Also, there’s less clean up. The thing I hate the most about cooking (and I love to cook) is the clean-up after. I’d love to make a meal, sit down and eat it and NOT have 20 minutes of washing up to do afterward. I try to clean stuff as I go along, but it would be even better to mess up someone else’s kitchen.
Finally, I wouldn’t buy too much stuff. That is, when green onions come in a bunch of eight, and I only need two, 7 times out of 10, the remainder goes bad before anyone remembers to eat it.
The expense is the only turn-off for me. I try not to spend that much on each meal. But right now I’m thinking of it more as OAMC lessons than a long-term solution. If I can gather several weeks’ worth of recipes, see how they break everything down and learn how to do it at home, then I can transition to doing it all on my own.