Among meal delivery services, there’s a subset that does more—or less—than bring reheatable food to your door. Spoon & Skillet, based at the Hood Kitchen Space in Costa Mesa, is one such outfit. Working from original recipes, sisters Megan and Mindy Rappe assemble precise amounts of properly prepped ingredients and package them with easy-to-follow cooking instructions. Meals can feature meat or fish, or be vegetarian, and can be further customized for gluten-free and vegan meals. Subscribers open the box, follow the recipe, and about half an hour later have a home-cooked meal. Two meals a week for two people start at $195 a month; you can see sample menus on their website. The most popular monthly plan is three meals a week for two.
There’s no doubt the planning and shopping for meals can stymie a lot of people. Along with the sheer convenience of this service, this has to be one of the strongest arguments for subscribing. I was curious, so Megan and Mindy gave me a meal kit to try from their current menu: ginger-steamed salmon with green tea salt, Brussels sprouts and spring mix salad with miso-honey dressing, and roasted sunchokes. Sounds good, doesn’t it? And it was. Another benefit of these meals is the chance to taste something new or worth revisiting, such as sunchokes, which I really like but don’t cook very often. And excellent homemade salad dressing that wasn’t made in my home, by me? (Or more likely by my husband, the vinaigrette master.) That’s just a little Love Gift all by itself. The produce, from Southern California farmers market superstars Maggie’s Farm and Weiser Family Farms, was absolutely pristine.
I was surprised to find a little knife work required, including slicing the sunchokes and cutting green tops of scallion for garnish. This was no big to me, but hurried cooks should be forewarned. The clear instructions for the meal included multi-tasking hints for getting the salmon going while the sunchokes roasted, and tossing the thin-sliced Brussels sprouts with dressing in advance of adding more tender salad greens.
A fresh, delicious meal is what you strive to serve whenever you cook at home. Spoon & Skillet goes a good distance toward getting you there.
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