Dinner Done Right....

One of the chores on the "Before Jamie Comes" list has been, for a while, get some meals ready and frozen so we don't have to cook later. Although we froze a large amount of pasta the other day that Glenn made, today we went to a place that would help us to prepare roughly 16 meals (8 for each of the two of us).

In Centreville, there is a business that is called "Dinner Done." At Dinner Done, you go online and reserve a spot and choose 8 meals that you would love to have to freeze. You go on the day that you reserve and they have all the ingredients set up for you and you just put it all together and put it in little metal pans to put into the oven later. You take these home, freeze them, and when you are ready to eat them, all you have to do is thaw them and cook them.

Not only was this an amazing idea, it was so much fun too! Imagine being Rachel Ray for a moment, where you have a team of people who come in before you and chop everything for you, get the meat separated out, melt butter, and even put the right measuring spoons in each bowl. That is what this place does. So you go to a little station, and follow the prepwork part of the recipe. Usually this involves nothing more than add this and that, and stir.

One would think with such a simple set-up, the meals couldn't be that fantastic. Au contraire! The meals that Glenn and I chose were Mozzarella-Basil Stuffed Meatballs, Asian Pork Tenderloin, Flounder with a Lemon-Caper Sauce, BBQ Chicken with Cornbread Bites, Tatsiki Chicken Skewers, Nori Wrapped Salmon (which involves wrapping the salmon in a seaweed like wrap to cook it in), Greek Chicken Pasta, and Tuscan Beef, in which we stuffed some beef loins with sundried tomatoes and feta cheese, and laid it on a bed of spinach.

This place is a godsend for anyone who is either too lazy to cook themselves, too uncreative to look for recipes, or most of all, people who, for whatever reason are unable to cook. They even have something called a Stork Session. With this, if you have had a baby in the last month, you can order the meals online and the company will not only put them together for you, but (if you live within 10 miles) they will deliver it to you. Unfortunately, we live 12 miles away. Luckily, a friend of ours (Mellinger) lives only 10.5 miles from them, so we are thinking about getting them to deliver there, and Glenn will drive the 5 minutes over to Mellinger's apartment and pick the stuff up. Of course, Mellinger doesn't know this yet.

At this point, we are thinking we may be INCREDIBLY tired about a month after Jamie is born, and in an effort to avoid grocery shopping, we may take advantage of the Stork Session. In the grand scheme of things, it is pretty much the same amount of money as going to the store.

But the taste, you wonder? How good can a meal that has been frozen be? Well, that I don't know yet, but I can tell you that we tried out half of the meatballs with the marinara sauce we made, and they were delicious. The plan from now is to try to remember what we put into the meatballs. I remember the ingredients, but now I have to think back to the amounts. Thank goodness for my photographic memory!

If you are curious, check out their website... www.dinnerdone.com.