Home Meal Reviews: Week 6 - TableRunner

Meals:

As you may have noticed, these are not meals you prepare yourself! As with Freshly, these are basically expensive tv dinners. Unlike Freshly however, they are meant to be cooked in the oven, giving some more depth and flavour to the food.

Convenience

The service delivers on a Monday, always a plus in my mind as this means you aren't having to deal with old food or eating out on a Monday evening. The packaging is nice and secure and comes with a pre-printed return shipping label that you just stick over the old one to get the box sent back. If you have easy access to a UPS facility, this is great but the boxes themselves are too big to fit in the standard drop boxes which is a bit of a pain.

Preparation

20 minutes in the oven may not be as snappy as Freshly was but it's not a big time sink and it turns up much better results.

Ingredients

The ingredients are fresh, seemingly never frozen and all laid out and ready to cook up. The only slight annoyance is rough handling can leave everything mashed up in one corner of the box (a problem that Freshly also had).

Taste

These are not quite up to the levels of the top home preparation meals like Peach Dish and Gobble, these still fall a little short however they are worlds better than the meals offered by Freshly. Four dishes were tried between my girlfriend and myself and everyone was appreciatively polished off. The pork Chimichurri was a particular favourite with me.

Conclusion

I think that this may be a good option if you are looking to avoid take out, wanting your food to be quick, free of refined ingredients and calorie controlled then this may well be an option for you. I am not sure they really do the best job pitching it this way (all the materials you are sent are very vague about the ingredients/components) but the site material seems to back it up.

Home Meal Reviews: Week 5 - PeachDish

PeachDish is up this week, one nice thing is that you can adjust your meal quantities and out of sheer novelty, I dialed things back to two this week:

Meal 1 - Thursday: Chicken & Dumplings

I love dumplings and although these were different to the ones I grew
up with, they were still delicious!

Meal 2 - Wednesday: Hanger steak with kale and apple salad

Not as artfully presented as on the card but still tasty.

Convenience

Another company that will only deliver Tuesday or later but what I found even more disturbing is that the food is getting shipped from Atlanta, GA... That's a lot of air miles. I have to say the ingredients were all really nicely bagged and presented. There was an extra bag with a couple of cookies and apples... and a freeloading spider in one of the apples which was a little less appreciated than the rest.

Preparation

Gobble is still the bar here and PeachDish doesn't meet it although it comes closer than anything else. There is more preparation required than there was for the Gobble meals however it felt like there was a lot less than for the other food options. Limited chopping, mostly one pot cooking and an elegant simplicity. On top of that, the recipe actually has things in order! I love this, all the bits of food actually come out at the same time and all hot! Just be careful about the timings, the stated times are not always what are needed. The instructions also expect you to know the terms and methods ahead of time. It won't tell you what parts of a vegetable to discard vs keep or what sealing / searing is. 

Ingredients

Peach Dish have clearly heard of bachelors, they provide all the short shelf life ingredients, milk, butter, everything is included and of very nice quality. It's just a shame that it is getting flown so far.

Taste

The menus that I got were simple and delicious, there is 'peach salt' that is a herb/salt mix which is added to a lot to the foods. These are dishes that I would actually try and replicate myself for friends which is a first I think.

Conclusion

The menus are good, although I think the price point is a little high but where this service let's me down is how far it is traveling to get to me. If you live in Atlanta this is a service to try but I can't recommend for folks in the bay area.

Next week, it's completely pointless as a tablecloth but can TableRunner pull it off as a food delivery service?

Home Meal Reviews: Week 4 - Blue Apron

I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving. As a new migrant from the UK, this holiday is a new concept to me but I enjoyed it immensely. The idea of a roast dinner with mashed potatoes instead of roasted is novel and awesome... but back to food delivery and this week I look at the big shot in the arena - Blue Apron:

Meals:

Meal 1 - Thursday: Fish Ramen

It looks good but the fish was basically raw and the whole thing
was overpowered by the taste of fish.

Meal 2 - Saturday: Chicken Meatballs & Celeriac Mash

A bad picture of a delicious meal. I could even tolerate the kale
and Celeriac is a new favourite.

Meal 3 - Wednesday: Chili Rubbed Steak, Kimchi & Rice

Rotten Basil, no scallions, the kimchi was poor but the rice was good.

Convenience

Ok before we even get to the food delivery, lets start with the website. This is possibly the least helpful website I have ever encountered (and I am including broken websites that return 404 errors). The site will always take you through the same 'registration' steps regardless of whether you are new or returning. It will also take any excuse to deprive you of any discounts or vouchers you have applied. I ended up going through the whole process four times before I could get a discount to stick right the way through to payment. One prior attempt I had been assured of a discount at every step... until I got to the payment page where it was inexplicably the full price. In all honesty if it hadn't been for the sake of this review I would have given up after a couple of failed attempts and just told everyone I knew to avoid them like the plague. And I am not even going to get started with the cancellation process - to complete that you need to be the procedural equivalent of American Ninja Warrior. The food for all previous services had been bundled by meal. Blue Apron did some of this but some ingredients were loose and this lead to an issue with all the scallions being used in a single recipe instead of being split across two as was intended.

Preparation

These meals come with a similar level of preparation requirement to HelloFresh, about 45min and a lot of chopping practice! However the recipe cards are just as poorly laid out as Hello Fresh with no clear indication of when things should run alongside other things etc occasionally leaving some components of your meal cold.

Ingredients

The basil for the third meal had wilted before I got to it, as had some of the scallions, but everything else was good and the steak in particular was clearly excellent quality.

Taste

The meals were very hit and miss. Some components were delicious, some (like the 'quickkimchi') really weren't.

Conclusion

I really can't recommend this in any way, it is beyond me how anyone has opted for this over HelloFresh.

Next week: PeachDish all the way from... Atlanta apparently...