Home Meal Reviews: Week 1 - Gobble

Meal 1 - Wednesday: Pan Roasted Chicken Fricasse with Leeks and Foraged Mushrooms

It really did taste as good as it looks, possibly better!

Meal 2 - Thursday: Argentinian Skirt Steak with Patatas Bravas & Charred Vegetables

The Chimichurri sauce on the steak was particularly delicious

Meal 3 - Saturday Lunch: Vegitarian Moussaka with Greek Salad

I don't like lentils and I still loved this.

Convenience

This is probably my major disappointment with this service. I (like, I think, most people interested in this service) want to have a few meals a week, for nights when I don't have other plans. Of course there are three obvious nights for having other plans: Friday, Saturday & Sunday. Based on this assumption, the obvious delivery day for your food is Monday. It turns out Gobble will only deliver (for me at least) on Tuesday, meaning I can't use this for a Monday night. All well and good, my girlfriend and I got ready for our first night of cooking at home... and waited... and waited. The food didn't actually arrive until almost 9pm. Gobble does advertise that the delivery will be made 'Between 8am and 8pm' which is fair enough, although I really don't want to be eating much later than 6pm. 

Gobble sent a very concerned email to me that I had not concerned email to me asking if there was a problem as I hadn't confirmed receipt of the order, which was lovely.

I responded to let them know the food was very late arriving:

Hi Diana, it arrived somewhat later than we had hoped so ended up with take out this evening but it has arrived.Thanks
Dev 

The response really disappointed:

Gobble - Dinner Solved

Jeff (Gobble) Nov 4, 12:45 Hi Dev, Thank you for letting us know and I am happy to hear the box arrived to you safely. Please know that our delivery partner, OnTrac does deliver up until 8pm. I apologize for the delivery arriving late than expected. All the best, Jeff

Looking back, this is not a bad response but it certainly felt like this is a complaint they see a reasonable amount and the first thing they appear to do is mark the issue 'solved'. (Dinner solved is actually Gobble's tag line but it did look bad coming to my inbox.) 

The result was that we had to try and force in the third meal to our routine which didn't work out so well (see above)

Preparation

Gobble is SUPER easy, virtually no chopping was required, one pan and one bowl was about all that was needed. There is a bunch of scissor work to open vacuum sealed bags which is a bit tricky but the rest is pretty simple. One thing that was a pleasant surprise is that the '10 minutes' really is ten minutes! I would say 8-15minutes from pulling the food out of the fridge to sitting down to eat it.

Ingredients

The food is supplied in bags with the meat vacuum sealed to prevent freezer burn and preserve it better. The other ingredients are conveniently packaged in bags within bags... convenient until you need to open anything! Every item is in a bag that needs scissors to cut. Holding the bags so meat juice doesn't leak out and cutting it at the same time is definitely a two person job. If I had been trying to prepare these on my own, I would have gotten very annoyed.

The quality of the ingredients was certainly good, although by the time we got to meal three, the salad items had gotten pretty mushy in places (bruised cucumber and what looked like cold burn on the lettuce).

Taste

We loved pretty much everything. The first two meals (Chicken Fricasse and Argentinian Steak) were really really delicious. I had been a little cautious about the Patatas Bravas but all of the food came out delicious and tasty. The only thing is that the portions are possibly a little smaller than some people would like. I finished the food still feeling a little hungry, as I am trying to improve portion control at the moment, this wasn't a problem for me but my girlfriend also thought the portions were a little small and she's not a big eater.

The third meal was a bit different. The amount of food made was plenty for us and infact between us we barely managed two thirds of the Moussaka which was also delicious (and I don't normally like lentils!). The salad however was not so great. Neither of us a big fans of Salad dressing and without that, there was nothing very interesting about it. It also didn't really go with the Moussaka.

Conclusion

If you want food that is conscientious of pot usage, really does stick to a ten minute prep time with a minimum of cutting and slicing and tastes delicious, then this is certainly a good option. I also rate this as a really good option for cooking with your other half because getting the food out of the bags can be a bit tricky!

Gobble is $11.95 / serving ($71.70 per week for six servings) making it the most expensive of the offerings I have seen so far. The quality seems to reflect this but I will come back to this in my review round up in a few weeks.