M and I went to Supper Solved a week or so ago to make dinner entrees. It’s one of those newish places that’s designed to send you home in a relatively short time with a whole pile of dinners ready for the freezer.
It’s set up in stations, one station per recipe, and each station has the recipe posted and everything you need to make that recipe. If it says “add one cup chopped beets” there’s a bin of chopped beets in front of you with a clever 1-cup scoop/measuring spoon in it, and so on. When you’re done making the recipe you put it in aluminum freezer-to-oven containers, stick a pre-printed label on top so you’ll know later what it is and how to cook it, and then just walk away and leave the mess behind for staff to clean up. They change the recipes monthly.
It’s not really set up for kids, but it worked OK — M read the recipes and did the majority of the prep work, except if it required touching raw meat (“ew! slimy!”) or if the bins were out of her reach. If we go again I’ll take a little step-stool for her.
The quality of the ingredients was very good and I was happy with the quantity for the price. Chicken entrees had 6 boneless skinless chicken breasts, salmon had 6 good-size salmon fillets, pork tenderloin had 2 large tenderloins, etc. While it’s still a relatively expensive way to do dinners, it’s certainly not usurious and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than going out or ordering in. And boy, is it ever nice to have all the prep work and cleanup done by someone else.
We split most of the entrees in half (they provide smaller packages for that purpose) since we don’t have all that many occasions on which we need to feed six people at once. A bunch of them have now gone to some friends who have a very new baby so they don’t have to eat lasagne constantly*.
We were in & out in ninety minutes, but that’s with a six-year-old reading the recipes, doing most of the work and slooowwwly making sure the label stickers were JUST SO. With two adults doing different recipes at different stations at a reasonably brisk pace you could probably finish six entrees in half an hour or forty minutes.
I took our wire-frame granny cart to schlep everything home, which worked very well. It was light enough to lift up our stairs at home so I imagine it would be fine to lift onto a bus too.
We’ve now eaten three of the entrees and they’ve all been excellent. So, two thumbs up!
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* not that there’s anything wrong with lasagne, but after a week or two one does crave a bit of diversity in one’s dinners…