Cooking Made Easy with MissFresh

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MissFresh sounds like a really first world problem kind of company. You think to yourself, who is lazy enough to have a grocery service? But the fact is, it’s great, and after giving it a shot, I’m going to become a regular customer, because what they offer is lot of fun and you can always skip a week if you don’t feel intrigued by what’s on offer.

How it works is that you receive an insulated box, delivered to your home or workplace, and it has everything that you need to make the meals. All of your produce and your ingredients are prepackaged and measured out, so nothing will be left going rotten in your fridge at the end of the week. You are given a series of recipes and then you pick when you are going to make which meals.

I’m a vegetarian, and I became a vegetarian back in the bad old days of icky overly processed tofu and weird “meat replacement” products. Vegetarian options are ubiquitous in restaurants nowadays, but the fact is, 20 years ago, nobody cared what your dietary preferences were, so you ate at home a lot, and so I became a decent cook. So why would I want to take advantage of this kind of service? Easy. All of the meals that they offer are designed to be ready in 30 minutes or less. Your vegetables are cleaned. Your portions are portioned. Your guess work is gone. It’s like having your own personal sous-chef and meal planner. You don’t get to be annoyed by what’s in the fridge, and vexed because you are missing a crucial ingredient because the thinking part is done for you, which at the end of a long day, can be a relief.

Another reason that this service is seriously the bomb is that you get to play with new recipes. They send you these slick cards with every box with the instructions on how to make the meals, and since you pick which week you participate in, they don’t send you the same things over and over, which means that you get to kind of build your own cookbook. This is something that I appreciated, as it forced me out of my cooking rut, and also let me play with new ingredients without investing in a huge quantity of said new thing that I may or may not use ever again. This avoids the years old condiment shelf problem, and I really appreciated it because I have a visceral reaction to every half package of celery that I throw out. So no shame spiral for when stuff goes bad.

A friend who I showed everything to also commented that this would be a great way to get kids involved in cooking at home. Since it’s basically fool proof, you could involve the youngins in the process, and get them used to cooking at home. Heck, if the kid is 10 years or older, they can probable make you dinner for a change.

The recipes that I was sent were simple but delicious. The produce was obviously chosen with a lot of care. As you can see from the pictures, ingredients that are involved in multiple recipes are clearly indicated, and for everything else, just dump the package into the appropriate bowl.  Because the ingredients are so high quality, the food was pretty darned delicious. 

I enjoyed everything on offer, immensely. The bean salad was to die for, not a descriptive that I have ever used for a bean salad. The noodle stir-fry was nice, with a sweeter flavor coming from a mirin-based sauce, and the tofu dish’s sauce was a touch too spicy for me, and that is really saying something, but still really flavorful. I also had all the dishes as leftovers the next day, and at least two of the recipes were even better. Fried tofu is just not going to be good the next day, so it’s not as if you can do anything about that, and it was still pretty good. Also, everything actually kind of looked like the picture at the end of the process, and that is kind of exciting in and of itself.

I say, if you can financially justify it, give this a try, at least once. It’s a really fun way to get excited about getting home to cook. The one criticism that I had was that I found some of the portions to be small, and given that fact, the caloric output for said food was a bit high. But it’s not as if you are chugging canola oil, it’s still reasonable, and as previously mentioned, the quality of the ingredients is notably high. I love this company and I think that you will too.

For more information, exact pricing and to sign up: https://www.missfresh.com/. There is a vegetarian and an omnivore “gourmet” option to choose from and you can choose 5 meals or 3 meals from your box, each providing 2, 4, or 6 portions per meal.