Home Meal Reviews: Week 2 - HelloFresh

Entering into week two, Hello Fresh is a similar service to Gobble with 'quick to make' foods from good ingredients.

Meal 1 - Tuesday: Pork Medallions

I just couldn't stop the sour cream being lumpy...

Meal 2 - Wednesday: Chicken Meatballs & Gnocchi

It didn't look like the picture, but still tasted pretty good.

Meal 3 - Thursday: Steak Bibimbap

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

Convenience

Unlike Gobble, HelloFresh is able to deliver Monday evening, giving you, three meals for two to use through the week. I was very impressed with the presentation of the ingredients with each meal in a nice box. Having the service deliver on Monday was a lot more convenient for us and meant I didn't end up needing an additional day of take out fattening me up.

Preparation

I don't think I really lauded Gobble's virtues in this area nearly enough. HelloFresh is basically giving you exactly what you would get from shopping in a store, just in the correct measures. This means there will be plenty of chopping, slicing, grating, peeling and more to be done. This partly explains the increased time in getting the food ready - these meals take 30+ minutes rather than the mere 10 minutes offered by Gobble. You are going to need a Pot and a Pan and a chopping board and probably some bowls handy for putting things to one side etc etc for each recipe giving you a ton of extra washing up along the way.

Ingredients

Oh how I miss the days when my biggest complaint was the packaging! HelloFresh is much more limited in what it is providing. I was having to add in sugar and eggs. The ingredients were not poor quality but the fact they aren't already prepped caused a few issues. The carrots in the Bibimbap recipe, for example, were very dry from the storage making peeling them a total nightmare.

Taste

As with Gobble, it was all pretty tasty but the way that HelloFresh tends to use lots of little bits and doesn't give the tight timing structure leaving parts of the meals cold when they really shouldn't be. I am not sure I can identify whether this is a result of my inability, lack of clarity in the instructions or poor decision making in the meal design.

Conclusion

If you are wanting to really learn to cook, then there are some merits to this service. Gobble has some 'secret sauce' components you couldn't reproduce, that is certainly not true of HelloFresh! This is a real case of you are cooking and learning to do everything. The downsides of this are the time factor and the real risk of screwing something up and ruining the meal. I think that this could be solved with better, clearer instructions for each meal, but without this I can't really recommend this one.

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.

A Day to Give Thanks

Well my this will be my first Thanksgiving since moving to the US... Of course I am not actually in the US right now as I am on a business trip to Zurich however I am still taking this to heart as my first ever thanksgiving (I had Turkey for lunch and everything).

Aside from the more popularized aspects of Thanksgiving (Eating too much, Football - NFL, and Macy's Parades) there is one fundamental aspect that, whilst being captured in the name of the holiday, I had not really considered until I started working for a US company - Giving Thanks for all the things you have.

This is an interesting idea for me, not least because I (along with everyone else I know) takes so much for granted. If I were to truly list every thing that I am thankful for, it would be a very long list indeed (and would still miss many more things that I ought to include). The list would start off looking like this:

I'm thankful for:
- Being alive
- My parents
- Being able to walk
- Being able to feel
- My eyesight
- Having opposable thumbs

... and you can already see how this would rapidly escalate. So instead I am going to take the gripes, bugbears and all the things that have annoyed me lately and find something in there to be thankful for.

Job
While I may be stuck at the same grade year after year, I am in a new country and an new organisation and with that comes new opportunities. If I work hard and can get on the good side of upper management then there is a very real chance of making some headway. Not to mention I am still working at one of the best companies in the world! And it has given me the opportunity to live in another country!

Friends
I really miss my friends back home but I will be seeing a bunch of them next week and I am getting to meet a ton of new people on this adventure.

Relationship
It seems like I'm about to loose my other half to another timezone for a long time if not forever. I have found an amazing girl and had loads of good times with her. Where the future takes us? Well we'll see.

Housing
Since moving, housing has been a constant uncertainty as I struggle to find a place that is affordable, in a good location and can meet my needs, but I ALREADY have a great place! It meets my needs and is all mine!

I am thankful for all of these things and mostly that I am continuing on my adventures.

- Raggy

Private school education

I haven't posted in a little while due to a lack of inspiration, however I recently had the following article pointed out to me:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-29818363

I went to independent schools for my education and have always been grateful to my parents for what was undoubtedly a better education than I could possibly have expected otherwise. In my mind there is no doubt that it has ensured I have had the opportunities and successes that I have.

I'd overlooked this article initially as a biased lambasting of independent schools and sadly that is the case. The first half of the article does little but highlight that if you pay for education, you end up with more money. However the second half of the article starts to highlight some more interesting factors that are obscured or left unanswered:

• Why is there still a gender pay gap?
• Whilst they factor in similar universities, they don't track against similar grades. What would this show?

I think the study this article is based on is close to highlighting that private education provides valuable 'x factors' in contacts and behaviours that would make a real difference to schooling... But once again it is lost in the cry of 'life's not fair'.

Ghostbusting Tunes

While I'm sat plugging away at work, I'll typically listen to a podcast of one description or another (This American Life, Podcastle, Escape Pod and The Dice Tower are some of my favorites). But there are times when even I, slacker that I am, has to concentrate and whilst this will usually cause me to switch on Elmnts for some background noise that I can use to tune out by surroundings, recently I have been exploring the offerings of my Play Music subscription which (like Spotify) allows me to trawl the universe of music for a wide array of options of mind bogglingly bad music. You don't even have to venture far from the beaten track!

For instance, do you like Nirvana? do you also like a number of female vocalists? in that case Grrl Rock Radio is clearly going to be a winning playlist for you!... Now not all of these are terrible... just 99% and in their defence there are a plethora of fascinating and mostly man-hating band, album and song names in the mix to provide some light relief from yet another debugging session and the accompanying bleeding ears. Some of my personal favorites include Phallus Über Alles, Frumpie One Piece and not least Babes in Toyland. Listening to this station just left me thinking of 10 Things I Hate About You and in particular this line from Patrick:

         
                                 CAMERON
                    (continuing)
                    Alright.  Okay -- Likes:  Thai food, feminist 
                    prose, and "angry, girl music of 
                    the indie-rock persuasion".  Here’s a list of
                    CDs that she has in her room.
          
                                 PATRICK
                    So I'm supposed to buy her some noodles and a 
                    book and sit around listening to chicks 
                    who can't play their instruments, right?
          

Next up was 'Eat My Shorts' Radio - hoping for something that would evoke a bit of early Simpsons nostalgia... what I neglected to realise is that Eat My Shorts is in fact a term that was used by more rebellious kids of the 80s as way of saying Eat my shit without getting into trouble I guess and this music is meant to represent what these kids would have listened to... all I can say is that 80s Shorts kids had terrible taste. This is a lot of American post-Sex Pistols, pre-Nirvana angry rock. It exemplifies bad recording quality, bad playing and a general lack of talent.

Finally I went for a music to code to playlist that seemed to largely feature electronic music, never a genre I was a fan of but some of the tunes were decent, and then I started listening to Justice which intrigued me and I followed up checking out a music video of one of the angrier tracks on YouTube... I am not really sure what this was aiming for except possibly just notoriety to increase their brand.

So in the end I went back to my preferred method of listening to Play Music... take a song / album / artist I know I like and start a 'Radio Station' based off of that... It always works. This time one based off of Ok Go's new album - Hungry Ghosts which is fantastic.

A rather mixed musical experience but it kept the week interesting!

On a totally unrelated note, as those who follow me on G+ will already know: I spent the weekend building this:

Oh yeah! That's right, I built my very own Ecto-1! I had wanted to film the whole build but sadly I only have my phone with me here and apparently it only films for a limited time... but for those of you that have too much time on your hands, here is the first 15 minutes of the build - mostly the crew and their plinth.

Let me know what you think!

A darker side of Lovecraft

I had originally intended to write a lighter post with a collection of witty and delightful anecdotes for my reader's amusement. Since arriving, I have taken note of many things that have interested me, highlights and the occasional lowlight (healthcare I'm looking at you) of living in the US however as I was finishing up last week's post, an old friend and former boss of mine highlighted an interesting article though his own G+ feed. The Wikihole that I followed in trying to verify the contents of that blog is what led me to write the addendum to my last post and this revelation (to me at least) of the depth and malice of Lovecraft's racism is what has lead me to this post.

I was not a huge reader as a young child, TV was a lot easier and I have always been lazy. Being a little too old to be among the generation that discovered Harry Potter as the gateway drug to literacy, and finding Tolkien hard to read at that age, it was actually Poe and Lovecraft that gave me the entrance to this paper world. I had plenty of imagination as a youngster and whilst TV and Films attempted to scare in rubber suits, loud noises and rapid camera changes that left me more frustrated and occasionally deafened than actually scared. These techniques have been refined since but they still have noting on the suggestions and fears that are born of the darker corners of ones own mind and this is what Poe and Lovecraft (and to a lesser extent Stephenson, Shelley & Wilde) shone. Their writing contained just enough detail to let your brain take over and fill in the gaps with tailor-made fear inducing thoughts that no celluloid craft can do.

The revelation that Lovecraft was a racist was not a revelation to me, in fact I had taken it for granted that both Poe and Lovecraft were racist and this in part allowed them to form these visions of horror that are so visceral but my further reading, inspired by this article really changed the light in which I see these stories and made me question how I should judge these things and to what extent it should influence my opinion of the author's output. This is a really difficult thing to answer and speculations as well as facts have plagued many notable creator's reputations - Walt Disney is another example. However in the case of both Poe and Disney, it seems that these speculations really were largely unfounded and biased more around the culture of the time than any actual underlying sentiment of religious or racial hatred. Poe is known to have freed a slave under his ownership and Disney has been widely exonerated by the numerous peers and employees that knew him. Lovecraft however is far from a 'victim of the era' or misunderstood. The Horror at Red Hook is the most widely know example of this racial hatred in writing but the poem that Nnedi cites in her article is far beyond even this in the depth and malice of Lovecraft's hatred. This writing is much more akin to something you would see from a white supremacist or Neo-Nazi than an intelligent man that shaped an entire genre of fiction.

So where does this leave me and my opinion of Lovecraft's work? Well I didn't feel ready to come to any definitive answer so trawled the web for some more articles that explore this topic in more depth and with differing perspectives. In particular I found this article by David Nickle and this article by Bruce Lord which look at the realities of Lovecraft's world and opinions, how his poverty and experiences had some part in shaping his views but also that there are no small number of examples of his excessive racism directed not just at black people but anyone not conforming to a Eugenically clean heritage. My own background as a 'mongrel' seems particularly bilious to him.

All of this has definitely darkened my view of Lovecraft as a role model, as a figure of respect however in someways it is clear to me that this deepset hatred is a primal former of the writings and ideas that he generated and for that I am glad of everything that Lovecraft was, for all my childhood, my love of books and the wider mythos that his writings have inspired. Lovecraft is a dick, but it hasn't stopped him writing great works.

Please subscribe and let me know your thoughts on Lovecraft, his beliefs and his writing.

Coming next week... something with a lighter tone, I promise.

Erring to Republican

'To err is human; to forgive, divine"
- Alexander Pope

I'll be honest, this quote has very little to do with anything else in this blog entry aside from the fact that it also contains the rather under utilised (in my opinion at least) word: err. It was however interesting looking up the quote as I had originally marked it down as something from Wilde which would at least have allowed me to tie in some of the rest of this post... but Alexander Pope is a man I know little about and rather sent me down the Wiki-hole as I got sucked into an impromptu education on Jacobite/Hanoverian clashes - a subject I never really covered in History class at school and will not resurrect here however if Catholic/Protestant fighting in England in the 1700s is of interest to you then there is plenty to be found out there. Pope was born in London to a Catholic family became a famous poet of the age and happened to write the quotation above. That is really all I feel qualified to say about him. I have read a few of his other writings and translations (he was a talented polyglot as well) and am not particularly enamoured with any of it...

But as I already indicated, none of this really has anything to do with what I meant to write about this time. The actual subject is likely to appear about as dry and mundane to the majority of you... the DMV. For those of you not familiar with this formidable institution: The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is the governmental organization that is charged with every aspect of an American citizen's use of a car from licensing to registration to revoking all of these when they are caught driving under the influence of what ever narcotic may be in vogue at the time. To those of you more familiar with the DMV you will probably be more familiar with is as one of Satan's residences on earth.

Before I go full swing into my rant about the ineptitude about the various US Governmental organizations, the DMV in general and their specific influence on my political leanings... a brief disclaimer:

1. I am not (yet) entitled to vote in the United States of America and whilst this post may be deemed a ringing endorsement of everything (or at least one small part of) what the Republican party stands for... it is mostly satire... if you are a Republican... firstly, I'm sorry and secondly, you can find the meaning of satire here.

2. America is a big place... it has five times to population of the UK and that is without accounting for the illegal residents that make up a significant portion of many areas of the US, and more than 37 times the size of the UK... This makes any kind of logistics/bureaucracy/organization a complete nightmare (for reference see: Pretty Much the Entire History of Imperial China). That America has over come these challenges to become the world's most powerful nation is a testament to either a lot of tolerance or sheer bloody mindedness (I have yet to figure out which).

Ok disclaimers dealt with, on to offending pretty much everybody:

I am one of life's pedestrians... I like walking, I like public transport (although experience of buses here have convinced me that Sheldon had a point about bus pants) and I get positively excited about the prospect of a long train journey! (Total non sequitur this is awesome). Sadly being willing to walk for an hour to get some place is not sufficient in this country (see population size vs area above) and frankly there are a lot of places where there is no bus/light rail/train. The net result is that no matter how much I like walking, I have to bow to the inevitable and get a car (and a driving license).

So what does all this have to do with turning me into a gun toting, red necked republican? Well one of the less objectionable things that the Republican party stands for is an end to 'Big Government' an ideal that largely seems to endorse independence of the states to run themselves without the interference of an overriding national government. The underlying premise is that when bureaucracy gets 'too' big ('too' being a variable dependant on whatever currently most helps the speaker), things become unwieldy, inefficient and worst of all - expensive.

The DMV is really the best possible example of the evils of Big Government. It operates across the country, causes huge amounts of misery and unhappiness has staff who seemingly have no motivation to work fast or efficiently, internal structures and processes that are not only archaic but totally ineffectual. I am not convinced anything in the process have changed from the 70s... nor has the capacity seemingly coping for 50% more people than it was designed for.

For my own experience... I arrive early and spend an hour queuing lining up outside before the place even opens (and I was by no means the first to arrive with the queue already half way around the building by my arrival and fully wrapping it prior to opening). Once inside I wait another hour before finally making it to a window where I am told in a blunt and obnoxious manner that they won't accept an electronic version of the I-94 (catch form names abound in this country). This came as something of a revelation to me after I had been explained explicitly and in no uncertain terms that this form was never to be printed out, a printed version is not required by any government agency and that a print out would not be sufficient evidence of my immigration status... I got about two words into asking about this before I summarily cut off as the teller called "NEXT" and the woman behind me shunted me to one side. So back to the office, print out something I was pretty sure was a worthless piece of paper to now wait 3 hours to go through the process again... to wait another hour to sit the written (sit is metaphorical here as you are not in fact able to sit down while taking the test)... then another thirty minute wait to return the form... so the vaguely socialist 'everyone is equal' tech worker that woke up that morning with the intention of getting a provisional driving permit left the office some eight hours later looking to sign up to the RNC in the hopes of getting this red tape machine reduced to something that might work without costing the country what must add up to millions of wasted man hours every year and the corresponding economic impact.

Of course next time I could offset that cost using the other great American principle: Buying your way out of inconvenience

Weird information: I am currently living in the town where H.P. Lovecraft's wife spent her final years, passing away in 1972 at the age of 89. More on Lovecraft in a future blog post.