At Home Dinner Assembly Session

Posted by Raje on Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 9:34 pm. 0 Comments.

There are quite a few Dinner Assembly locations around these days. The concept being that you go and assemble dinners to freeze and later just cook at home and eat. They provide you with all the ingredients pre-chopped, all you do is go assemble the meals as per the number of servings you need. They provide you either with Ziploc style bags or foil containers to assemble the meals. Once assembled you take them home and freeze them. Some can be cooked straight from the freezer and others need to be defrosted before cooking.
I tried one of them, but it did not really work out for me. I found the food too rich and lacking in the variety I might want. Most of these places are geared for an American diet and really did not suit my family’s needs. We mainly eat chicken and Fish in meats and occasionally eat lamb, goat meat or shrimp. Vegetables are very important and I would prefer to have a couple of Vegetarian dishes too . But mostly these day I try to make one pot meals or one dish meals which have both veggies and meat in them.

I usually try to strech the meats so that a 1/ 2 lb of chicken makes about 4 servings. This is usually possible if I make it a curry or cook it with vegetables. Fried chicken dishes will result in only two servings with a 1/2 lb of chicken.

Frozen Meal
Last weekend I decided to have my own dinner assembly session. Saturday night I cooked pasta and noodles. Sunday I did some basic shopping and began the assembly. I put the pasta in 2 quart size bags and put a half pound chicken, diced in 2 sandwich bags. these I packed flat into 2 gallon bags. That is 2 pasta dinners ready. I seasoned the chicken with some Italian seasoning and salt while packing. These 2 dinners went into the freezer. Next I did the same with the noodles. I seasoned the chicken for the noodles with a teriyaki sauce in one packet and a stir-fry sauce in another.
In another gallon bag I packed 6 1/2 lb chicken packs with teriyaki sauce, kung pao sauce, 2 ginger garlic only and 2 with ginger garlic and yoghurt.
I always have a mix of frozen vegetables at hand and throw in what ever I want on the day I want to cook the meal. that was 10 meals packed in about 3 hours including shopping and cleaning up. Ok so I am lucky enough to have all the shops close to home. Costco is about 5 min drive from home and the middle eastern shop where I buy my vegetables is about 10 minutes from home.
I also ground up 2 lbs of chicken to be used later and cooked 2 cups of toor dal. I plan to make mini burger patties with 1lb of the chicken. With the dal I plan to make a khichidi and a spinach dal. Some of the dal will also be eaten plain. I always add salt to the dal immediately after its cooked and still hot. Besides this I also made some Atukula upma. All these took another half hour.
We had a birthday party to attend in the afternoon and after comming back I made a chicken and noodle stir-fry and an easy saag chicken.
Phew!!! that indeed was a mega cooking and assembly session as per my standards. The good part is I am almost prepared in terms of noveg dishes for the next 2 weeks. And in terms of veggie dishes for the half on next week. I need to make rasam and a veggie dish in the middle of the week and that will cover the week. Next week I will have to prepare some veggies and dal dishes again.
Though time consuming, in terms of cost doing it at home is indeed more economical, but the advantages are that you can also choose what kind of meal you want and allow for a lot more variety. You can also control the quality of ingredients used. Meal assembly places do provide reasonably good quality ingredients but they still use the pre packaged sauces. One thing that did not go well for us is that Shilpi especially prefers drumsticks and thighs, where as the assembly places usually only offer breast meat.