Dream Dinners

Have you seen those places where you pay to go in and make dinners for your family for a whole month? There are lots of them...Dream Dinners, Dinners Ready, and Meals on Wheels. (Oooops, I think Meals on Wheels is actually for old people! Something to look forward to...)

But anyway, I tried Dream Dinners. Here's how it works: You pay them for a set number of meals for the month and you pick the entrees that you want. Then you make an appointment to go and prepare all the meals. They supply the food, the storage containers, and labels to explain how to prepare the food once you get it home. They have each entree set up at a separate station. You follow the recipe at each of the stations and put together each of your entrees and take them home to your freezer until you're ready to prepare them.

This sounds like a great idea, right? You've got nutritious, easy meals waiting at home to prepare at the drop of a hat. What could be better? Well, what they don't tell you is that you have to defrost the suckers. How long does it take to defrost a frozen block of Beef Strogonaff in a Ziploc bag? At least a day. So you still have to plan ahead for that. Then, you have to actually cook the food - because it's "prepared", but you can't just toss it in the microwave like a Stouffer's Lasagne. No sir. You have to follow the directions to bake, boil, or roast your dinner. That can take 10 minutes or it can take 45 minutes, depending on what meal you choose.

Also, your whole freezer will be packed with silver trays and baggies of frozen meals, which takes up all the space and leaves no room for bottles of vodka and Haagen Daz ice cream. Not cool. And, P.S., they only provide you with the main course - you still have to come up with the the salad, the side dish and whatever else you want to accompany your dinner.

But what if you're up for all that and you have a big freezer and time to prepare the meals? Well, for the most part, the meals suck. It all tasted kind of like food we had at the dining hall in college. The quiche was made with a crust that reminded me of Bisquick and the eggs in the quiche had come from a carton and not a shell. The Beef Stroganoff was good, but after I had it a few times, I was sick of it. (You get six meals of each item, which gets kind of old, unless you have a big family, which I don't.) The rest of the meals were forgettable and not something I'd want to have again.

So skip the Dream Dinners, buy a new cookbook with the money you saved and use that extra space in the freezer for a frozen Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake.