The hubs and I love to eat fresh, home-cooked meals.
Lately, we realized that thanks to our busy schedules, we end up picking up take-out, ordering in or popping a frozen pizza in the oven more times than not.
Recently while having dinner with some good friends who both work outside the home and who have one year old twins, we learned of their little dinner secret. These friends are, what I would call, foodies by nature. In fact, they live in downtown Dallas across the street from the Farmer’s Market, and even they find it difficult to put in the work and effort that goes into assembling a fresh, organic, home-cooked healthy meal every evening.
Enter Greenling.
Although their mission is to make local and organic foods more accessible, they do much more than just that.
Greenling has many different food buying options that are geared towards various lifestyles, but our friends specifically raved about the Engine meals. After just a little bit of research on their website, the hubs and I were convinced it was worth a try.
Here are the advantages as we see them:
- no more meal planning
- don’t have to shop for the groceries/ingredients as our contributor, Jenny, pointed out in this post from last year
- don’t have to cut/chop up all the ingredients
- no more wasting food (i.e. buying an entire celery stalk and only using what’s needed for one dinner before it wastes away in the back of the vegetable bin)
- it’s delivered to your door!
- still being able to eat healthy, fresh, organic & local
The all-important question that may be lingering in your mind – how affordable is it?
I have to admit that at first I thought it was not affordable until we started breaking down the math. I soon realized that in more ways than one, it truly is an affordable dinner option.
The Engine Diet Kits are $80 each for a 5 day meal kit. Because these kits are designed for two adults, that would equate to $8 per person for dinner.
But it gets even better. We’ve found that these daily kits are actually way too much food for just two people (and the hubs and I like to eat!). In fact, my aunt stayed with us for a few days during the week last week, and all three of us enjoyed a full meal from one kit each night. If you don’t have a house guest to share with or a Little who is willing to eat the foods, then you can always enjoy the leftovers for lunch the next day.
One of the things we were initially concerned about was whether or not Days 4 and 5 would still be fresh by the time we got to them.
Not only are they still fresh, but because we had said house guest as mentioned above, we ended up going out to eat one night thus “missing” our Day 5 dinner kit. Instead we incorporated the ingredients from Day 5 into our breakfast (yummy omelettes) on what would have been Day 8, and it was still fresh! So when life happens and you have other dinner plans creep into your schedule, you don’t have to worry about the food going bad.
I realized another advantage in the affordable column.
Because I can also buy many of my grocery staples such as meats, milk, eggs and cheese from Greenling (again, delivered right to my door!), we save money by keeping this shopaholic mom OUT of the non-grocery SuperTarget aisles. Because if you’re diligent enough to go to the “super” stores and only buy groceries, then you are much better disciplined than me!
How about you? Do you have any juicy little, time-saving dinner secrets you can share?
