Dinner, Solved (Part Two)

by Diana Yen for dcuisine

I mentioned a while back that I had been working on a food-centered project.

That project was dcuisine, which delivers really stellar flash frozen soups and entrees to your door; they are made by a certified Master Chef (a big deal in the foodie world if you don't know about the certification process.) You prepare them in boiling water (they come in a sous vide-style pouch) and it's a really simple process.

This endeavor was my first foray into the world of e-commerce, and it was a really interesting journey. Along the way, I got to meet the chef and taste and test nearly all the meals. My personal favorites? The butternut squash soup, beef bourguignon, and spicy Thai chicken soup.

The founders are really obsessive about making beautiful food and the meals, which use top-notch, organic ingredients and are created in small batches, show their attention to detail.

Their site is now live, and I'm pleased to offer free shipping for Williamsburg Baby readers. You order any combination of 8 soups or entrees at a time, and can keep them in the freezer to use whenever it suits you.

Just enter FRIENDS at check out between now and May 15.

We definitely could have used this when Axel was a newborn and when I'd leave meetings with a few packages to test and re-test, I'd feel a huge sense of relief because dinner was solved, and it wasn't terrible-for-us delivery food.

Dinner, Solved (Part One)

via Serious Eats

A friend had a code for a free week of delivery from Blue Apron, a subscription service that sends you the ingredients and recipe cards for three complete meals a week.

I had all but forgotten about signing up to give it a try it until the rather impressive box arrived yesterday (handy, because we had exactly zero plans for dinner and hadn't been able to get to the grocery store because we were away over the weekend.) You can sign up for a meat and poultry service or a vegetarian service.

We wound up making a delicious chicken satay with rice and a green tomato salad. My pictures didn't really turn out, but basically, everything in the recipe is pre-portioned like this:

via Katie at the Kitchen Door

You can check out Katie at the Kitchen Door for another review. The meat comes from Pat LaFrieda, a very fancy butcher in New York. It was all very straightforward and I liked the fact that we weren't going to waste any produce or esoteric oils (so often we have a giant bunch of cilantro that wilts in the fridge because we just needed a few sprigs.) The tiny bottles of things like sesame oil or mirin were pretty darn cute as well.

Will and I love to cook, and so this service suited us; it feels like you're really making dinner from scratch (but without any advance planning required.) We were saying a month or so of this would be the perfect gift for someone with a new baby, with the caveat that they'd have to like to cook in the first place to find this a real time saver.

I felt a bit guilty about all of the packaging that arrives with it, but I was glad to hear the box lining is biodegradable. In any case, the results were far better than my usual there's-nothing-in-the-fridge go-to, turkey tacos. The meals are portioned for two people, so the one drawback is no leftovers.

Like Farm to Baby, our baby food delivery service, this is definitely a luxury I'd only really justify because I'm working full time. Hey, whatever gets you through the week, right?