Friday Foodie: Freshly

Home cooking sounds nice. But, it’s hard. You have to find recipes, write a shopping list, go to the grocery, and then summon enough energy to chop and slice and sauté and broil and whatever else you need to do to create a homemade meal. Thankfully, companies like Blue Apron and Marley Spoon take out the first couple steps, but there’s still all the shredding and grating and grilling. And that brings us to Freshly.

Freshly is a weekly meal delivery service where meals are prepared and cooked by chefs, then packaged and shipped to you in individual servings so all you need to do is warm them up in your microwave for two minutes. Ta da! Dinner is ready! The business claims the meals are all-natural, gluten-free, packed with protein, and free from refined sugars. Sounds good, right? After falling prey to their successful advertising, I decided to give it a shot and ordered us a week of fresh, microwavable meals (at the first-box discount rate, of course).

So, we got the meals. And they sounded amazing! We chose Steak Peppercorn with Carrots and Asparagus, Meatloaf with Potatoes and Spinach, and Roasted Turkey with Quinoa Stuffing out of the 30 available options. Yum! We looked at the meals. They looked like fancy TV dinners. But we still tried them And they were good! I didn’t have to cook a thing, but I still got to eat a delicious warm dinner in the comfort of my own home.

But, there were some problems. Like one person’s meal is hot and ready to eat while the other person’s meal still has to microwave. And both Husband and I were incredibly hungry an hour afterwards, so much so that we split a PB&J sandwich. And then there’s the weird, internal thinking that this seems like cheating somehow. At least with Marley Spoon, I am using whole foods to prepare a large meal with a variety of textures and flavors, while these meals are all the same temperature with same consistency. And, like many other convenience foods, the meals are not cheap (about $10 each). I appreciate the health-conscious motivation and fresh delivery, but I still felt like I was eating a cheap frozen meal.

So, we canceled Freshly to return to the good ol’ days of finding recipes and writing shopping lists, but it was fun to try! Has anyone else checked it out?