My first delivery of Chefs Plate meals arrived today.¹

My company sent everyone SnackMagic boxes with treats for the holidays, and the box also came with a discount code for Chefs Plate, a meal delivery service.²

I decided to try it even though I’m not really the target market for it. We live close by to grocery stores and I enjoy cooking things from raw ingredients.

But, it was steeply discounted, and I’ve always been curious about these services. I don’t know how long this one has been available or what others there are in Canada / are live in Vancouver.

I picked the meals ahead of time with Rachael. This order included:

• Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken
• Creamy Butternut Squash Orzo
• Loaded Beef Burrito Bowls

Usual price $60CAD, discounted price $27CAD. For 2 people for 3 meals that’s pretty good.

Unboxing

You can pick different days of the week for delivery and they leave it at your door.

There is a glossy double sided print out of meal prep and cooking instructions. My first reaction was that this is a lot of packaging and paper and inks and it’s definitely wrecking the planet.

The kits are in a big cardboard box, each meal’s ingredients in a bag. The bags are compostable so you can use them for your bucket liner (as it says in the explainer).

There’s a compartment in the bottom with an ice pack and things that need to be kept cold. This week, chicken breasts and some ground beef. There was also a loose whole bulb of garlic.

The kit bags aren’t full to the brim, so the tops could be folded down. But I still had to find room in my apartment sized fridge to stick them.

Making Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken

We decided to make the chicken for dinner.

Here’s everything from the kit laid out on the counter. The sticker on the bag has a full ingredient list for everything like the spice blend and then mayo, plus the nutrition info for the whole meal.

The double sided instructions are good. Tells you the equipment and other stuff you need (basics like salt, pepper, oil, honey). And the instructions are laid out in time it takes to cook. So preheat the oven right away and get the potato wedges started.

And now we’ll teleport all the way to the plated meal. Chicken breast covered in mayo and panko-crusted, potato wedges baked in the oven with Montreal Steak Spice, and honey glazed carrots.

It was good! We added our own salt and pepper to everything as instructed and it was nice and flavourful.

It called for parchment paper for both the potato wedges and the final bake of the chicken. That was a nice tip for me to save on clean up and keep things crisp.

It definitely reminded me that potato wedges are something we can make any time!

The carrots are pretty much how I make them anyway - finished with a little butter and honey. Dill if you like, or I’ll add cumin seeds sometimes.

The mayo-instead-of-egg was another nice tip that I’ll be using.

All in all, a good, tasty first experience.

On Meal Kits Generally

The discounts to get me on a subscription is very much an investment driven business.

The packaging feels like a lot. But: no plastic other than on the meat.

There is an app, so maybe I can opt out of the printed meal instructions.

Are the ingredients local? Could one check a box and have 80% local ingredients?

Could one apply this to community supported agriculture?

This meal was ~$9CAD with discount, ~$20CAD without. For 2 people, that’s reasonable. The chicken breasts alone would cost me $5-6. Everything else low cost: 2 carrots, 3 potatoes, mayo, steak spice. Maybe another $1.

We used to do zero take out. And then the pandemic. Now we’re at 1-2 take out meals per week. This would be cheaper.

I’m interested in perhaps doing some food sharing with people, where everyone cooks a larger quantity and then shares with the group. Don’t know if I’ll get to it as a habit this year, but it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see more of.

And bulk buying!

I have done zero research on this in Vancouver. If you have thoughts on meal kits or on fun community food locally, let me know!

The Sifter thesifter.org

a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks.

– A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Atlas Obscura

The data on this site is super interesting. Whatever is running the site is not great. It’s some sort of out of the box Microsoft thing including default loading animations.

But! It aims to be a sort of Wikipedia. I’ve signed up to be a contributor and I hope that this can be built on and be licensed for re-use.

I did a search for “Vancouver” and found only one entry, so my used cookbook collection may be able to add a handful more. It does say it only wants pre-1940 cookbooks, but it’s unclear why.

It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s.

Yes! Super interesting to me. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

(From the Gastro Obscura section of A.O.)

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Weekends are time for me to do more elaborate / longer cooking. I'm the primary cook-er in the household, so I do cook most every day, but cooking is also relaxing downtime for me, especially when I get to try new things, or things that I don't cook very often.

Yesterday was an errand day in general. We bought 10lbs of peaches and apricots coming back from the Okanagan (at the Mariposa fruit stand in Keremeos, to be exact -- recommended by Chris Rich amongst the sea of fruit stands there). By now, it was time to process them in bulk in some way. So I made peach jam and apricot jam.

I've never made peach jam before. I used this Farmstand Peach Jam recipe, although as always, not exactly. I don't like using pectin, and I don't like to put in too much sugar. I ended up taking out a cup of cut up peaches at the last minute since I wanted to stick them in the freezer, and I think that was the error. Or, just that peaches are quite sweet to start with, and without pectin you can't skimp on the sugar. I had originally intended to also make some spicy peach chutney of some kind - I still have those peaches in the freezer, or I could even just use some of the jam and mix it with savoury ingredients to make it.

Next I made apricot jam. My mom makes this all the time, so I was reasonably sure the no-pectin method would work, and it certainly did. It turned out nice and tart. It was a pleasant surprise to find and use Jens Alfke's apricot recipe - a long time blogger whose feed fell from my reader at some point. So, score 1 for a great recipe (since it uses a formula for fruit-to-sugar) and for re-finding a great writer.

This morning I poached a couple of eggs for breakfast. Rachael is a fan of poached eggs, but I usually just find them too fiddly. I took it upon myself to actually look up some egg poaching instructions and they turned out nicely. In short: the water shouldn't be boiling, turn it off as soon as you put the eggs in, put a lid on it, and 3 minutes is about the right time length.

Wandering up Commercial Drive, I decided today would be a seafood day. So, I've got some Qualicum Beach scallop and side stripe shrimp ceviche marinating in the fridge. Recipe in short:

• 10 prawns, remove the shell and chop
• 4 large scallops, chopped
• 1/2 avocado, chopped
• 1/3 cup red onion, minced
• 1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
• 3 tomatillos, chopped
• juice of 3 limes
• fresh cracked pepper
• small red chile, minced
• 1/3 cup cucumber, chopped

It's marinating now, it may end up gaining some other bits and pieces as I adjust seasonings when it comes out of the fridge.

The key part of German potato salad for me is the lack of mayonnaise and eggs. I make this up from scratch whenever I make it, but my version always includes two essential ingredients: Dijon mustard as part of the vinaigrette (I like the flavour and tang that it adds) and finely chopped dill pickles (a satisfying crunch and burst of vinegary / salty goodness).

I also usually put in bacon / guanciale / schinken speck, but this time around, knew that there were going to be a number of vegetarians present and skipped the meat products. Hence, I (*gasp*!) accidentally made a vegan potato salad - which I didn't even realize until someone asked what was in it, and it dawned on me that yes, it was indeed a vegan potato salad :P

The full recipe is on Foodista:

Vegan German Potato Salad

OK, it's down to the wire, and I think I've figured out the menu for the Mover Dinner I'm putting on tomorrow. Mover Dinner? A thank you to all the folks that helped us move. When I'm short on cash, I pay in food!

First Course: Laksa a la Boris

I spent Monday making pork stock. This is going to be the basis for a Laksa-inspired soup - I'll add coconut milk, bean sprouts, noodles and likely some chicken. Fresh green onions and coriander will round it out.

Second Course: Spinach salad with Guanciale

I've talked about the beauty of guanciale before - I'll crisp up some cubes of it with garlic and make a honey / mustard dressing to go over spinach leaves and some tomatoes.

Third Course: Pita Wraps with Chicken

I'll marinate / grill the chicken in pieces, as well as have some roasted peppers, sautéed onions, a tomatillo-based salsa (maybe sort of like this one?), some fresh tzatsiki, and other fixings for people to make their own wraps.

Dessert Course

Some sort of white vanilla cake served with the strawberries & rhubarb that we got last weekend.

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Last of the Cutter Ranch lamb. Marinated with preserved lemons with bay leaves from my parents' garden, plus turmeric, coriander, garlic, etc. Served with cous cous with grilled peppers.

I was going for the Banana Leaf's Rendang Beef curry - which is a completely different dish, but I think I got the coconut right, as well as the sweet + tang + spice.

Spicy Coconut Tumeric Beef

Posted on Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes - http://foodists.ca/2009/12/29/much-ado-about-recipes.html

Chicken Marsala Recipe from Rouxbe.com

I’m facing a dilemma I’ve faced several times before. What to do about recipes?

I'm facing a dilemma I've faced several times before. What to do about recipes? We don't focus on churning out lots of start-to-finish recipes here on Foodists, mainly because it's more about sharing food experiences rather than "just" recipes. But we do share our recipes, and try and tag the blog entries with ingredient hints to help find them. Still, it's not ideal for sharing lots of recipes.

Most of my cooking using recipes falls into the "inspired by", "adapted from", or "I'm sure it'll be fine if I substitute half the ingredients" categories. But I'd like to keep track of those sources, whether it be from just the right Google search or from a physical cookbook.

And yes, I've got lots of cookbooks. At the one end I've got basics like Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer, and at the other end I've got various cookbooks from second hand or thrift stores, plus a smattering of regional cuisines purchased while traveling. While I like nothing better to sit down with piles of cookbooks all around me, engrossed in reading and dreaming of food, it's not very practical to a) easily find a recipe amongst dozens of cookbooks or b) to share that recipe. Where's my digital index for my physical cookbooks?!

I tried to solve my dilemma a while back by building my own recipe website. It does a passable of sharing links to recipes I've found elsewhere, and a pretty terrible job at inputting recipes with full ingredients and instructions. And, I really don't need to be maintaining yet-another-website.

So over the holidays, I again began looking for a great place to make my "digital recipe home".

My first stop was at Foodista. It's a startup out of Seattle that's just barely a year old, run by a friend of a friend. Foodista is unique in being a kind of Wikipedia of cooking. You can set recipes to be public, which means that anyone can edit and evolve them, whether that means fixing mistakes, clarifying the directions, or adding a note that Brand X flour needs to be used differently. I love this feature, and I love the concept of seeing the history or changes of recipes over time.

They also have a widget that links blogs to recipes and vice versa (similar to Urbanspoon). Here's an example of a Foodista widget for my favourite Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup recipe:

Foodista is still relatively new and will be evolving more features (check out my taste profile). I've already left a comment about making it easy to link in my own photos from Flickr.

Next stop was our own local recipe / learning website, Rouxbe. I've got an account from ages ago, and couldn't recall if they actually let you enter in your own recipes. They do, so I started work on entering in Shredded Short Ribs with BBQ sauce that I made over the holidays. At first, I was excited by the interface, which lets you upload a photo for each step. Ultimately, I gave up before completing and publishing the recipe, because there were too many fields and too much to fill out.

I think Rouxbe has a great interface for longer recipes, especially those with unfamiliar or complicated techniques (many of which they have video tutorials for that you can link in), and I would definitely use it for that kind of recipe. They even have a "Save as Draft" feature to make it easier to finish inputting those long recipes. Here's the embed for the Chicken Marsala that I used a screenshot of at the beginning of this post - the embed is gorgeous, but at the same time doesn't show the ingredients (which is what *I* would want out of a widget) and busts out of this blog layout: http://rouxbe.com/embedded_player.swf

Rouxbe Online Cooking School & Video Recipes

So, Foodists, help me with my recipe dilemma: What recipe sites do you frequent? How do you share / keep track of recipes that you find online? What features do you want out of an ultimate recipe website? And yes, I'm still contemplating building my own -- recipes.foodists.ca anyone? :P

So, I did a whole bunch of "experimental" baking today. Experimental mainly because a) I don't bake a lot and b) I tried tweaking a bunch of baking recipes. And by "tweaking" and "bunch", I mean not quite having all the ingredients for one recipe, so vaguely scavenging a few other recipes trying to see if I could come up with a Franken-recipe.

First up was corn bread for breakfast. Corn bread is, as far as baking goes, NOT HARD. However, I was faced with no flour, and the need for no dairy. The soy milk worked just fine. But spelt flour...

...OK, so spelt flour and me are done. I didn't really like it before, and yeah, stuff made with it is usually denser / coarser, which you have to watch for. But the main thing is, spelt flour makes stuff taste bad! Yes, it's true: I was relatively happy with how the slightly coarser, slightly crumblier corn bread turned out. Except it was infected with yucky spelt taste. *sigh*

At dinner (or rather, in the midst of cooking 2 things at the same time), I found out that all those yogurt containers in my fridge needed to have the yogurt used up so that I could use the empty containers (that, and so that fur wouldn't grow on the yogurt). The thought "yogurt cake" popped into my head, and so I looked at Lemon Yogurt Cake, Wonderful Yogurt Cake, and Simple Yogurt Cake. I also looked into my pantry after seeing that last entry about cake mixes and found chocolate pudding mix / pie filling. So that got combined with the yogurt...but a double-plus amount of yogurt...and off I went, creating a Franken-recipe for Chocolate Yogurt Cake.

I may post it for posterity as a full recipe later, as I did note it down. But, after baking, it's clear that I made a medium-rare cake. Medium rare is great for steak. It is not good for cake. Flavour is pretty good, but gooey...

Ah well, it was still fun. And I made two meat dishes to stock my freezer with, as well. Prime rib bones roasted on a mirepoix, and then simmered to make a nice and rich beef stock. 3 large empty yogurt containers for the freezer, plus a small bowl of soup for "first dinner".

Aside: how do you cool things before they go in the freezer? My apartment is small, and usually quite warm after I've been cooking and baking and such. I have a window in the kitchen, so I usually stick things to cool on the window sill. I haven't had a pigeon steal anything yet...

The other meaty item was beef stew, simmered for hours in the slow cooker. Another 5 or 6 meals worth, and all good hearty winter time stuff.

Source of all this good stuff? Famous Foods on Kingsway. An excellent, excellent store, heartily recommended for meats, bulk staples, and everything in between.