Yup! We've gone to "Dream Dinners" a couple times, and "Dinner's Ready" is the other one we have near us; seeems really similar.
Things I liked:
1) Not a bad price per meal
2) Nice to get a bunch of decent meals taken care of all at once with no mess in my own kitchen and no extra ingredients lying around, plus it adds some variety to the same old things we usually throw together for dinner.
3) Because you put your own things together, you can change things around a bit as you're compiling the meals (putting a little extra or less of something or leaving one ingredient out entirely, for instance)
4) It does give you some good ideas for relatively easy-to-throw-together meals to make yourself later; if you really like something, they're generally not all that hard to replicate (a cell phone pic of the assembly instructions is probably cheating, but would help here).
Things we've had trouble with:
1) Most meals need to be thawed for 24-48 hours (and a few weren't quite thawed after being in our fridge for two days). We're horrible about planning things that far ahead, so we found that some meals just sat in our chest freezer waiting for when we knew we'd have time for a good sit-down meal 2-3 days later.
2) We're both picky eaters, and most of these places won't tell you ingredients ahead of time (when you're choosing which meals to make) to enough granularity - for instance, we both dislike mushrooms, and we've had a couple times when a recipie includes a bunch of cream of mushroom soup; no way for us to have known that ahead of time, so we've ended up improvising on the fly.
I know the things we have issues with would likely not be problems for most people, and I do intend to give them a try again once we move; now that I'm working from home, the first item would probably be less of an issue. I'd say it's definitely worth trying once at least.
Things I liked:
1) Not a bad price per meal
2) Nice to get a bunch of decent meals taken care of all at once with no mess in my own kitchen and no extra ingredients lying around, plus it adds some variety to the same old things we usually throw together for dinner.
3) Because you put your own things together, you can change things around a bit as you're compiling the meals (putting a little extra or less of something or leaving one ingredient out entirely, for instance)
4) It does give you some good ideas for relatively easy-to-throw-together meals to make yourself later; if you really like something, they're generally not all that hard to replicate (a cell phone pic of the assembly instructions is probably cheating, but would help here).
Things we've had trouble with:
1) Most meals need to be thawed for 24-48 hours (and a few weren't quite thawed after being in our fridge for two days). We're horrible about planning things that far ahead, so we found that some meals just sat in our chest freezer waiting for when we knew we'd have time for a good sit-down meal 2-3 days later.
2) We're both picky eaters, and most of these places won't tell you ingredients ahead of time (when you're choosing which meals to make) to enough granularity - for instance, we both dislike mushrooms, and we've had a couple times when a recipie includes a bunch of cream of mushroom soup; no way for us to have known that ahead of time, so we've ended up improvising on the fly.
I know the things we have issues with would likely not be problems for most people, and I do intend to give them a try again once we move; now that I'm working from home, the first item would probably be less of an issue. I'd say it's definitely worth trying once at least.
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