Cooking for Dummies

One of the new hot fads these days are those meal-in-a-box deals.   You subscribe to a service like Hello, Fresh and they send you all the necessary ingredients needed to cook up a sumptuous meal.  Going to the super market is totally not needed.   They do it all for you.

I have a few friends who swear by this phenomenon.  The cooking is so easy and the meals are delicious.  Me?  I am not interested.  I would be lost without at least two occasions to wander around Ralph's.   Plus I like to experiment on my own.

But somebody sent my neighbors a few of these meals as a gift.   One of the recipes was Turkey Chiles Relleno and it promised to be too spicy for them, so they re-gifted it to me.   Since it was Sinko De Mayo, I was happy to try it out.

Okay, first off, they give you everything you need in a little bag right down to the onion, the poblanos, and the ground turkey meat.   All of it could have been easily purchased myself but I wanted to be the typical novice chef which I clearly am not.   I laid out everything on the counter and surveyed the instructions.

Hmm.  

Now, when I cook, I pride myself on doing it in a time-efficient method.  I like to plan ahead and make things easy.  But, as I surveyed the Hello, Fresh recipe, it clearly had me doing three different tasks virtually simultaneously.  But I wanted to be a typical consumer as I tested this out, so I followed everything to a tee.

About twenty minutes later, I was multi-tasking.   And not in a good way.  I sort of felt like Jerry Lewis in "The Errand Boy."   The steps required somebody to have at least a staff of two sou chefs to get this done.  And, because of the extreme degree of difficulty, my kitchen started to look like it had been hit with a pipe bomb.

Moreover, the illustrations on the recipe were virtually impossible to achieve.  The green peppers had shriveled up so there was no way to stuff them with the turkey and rice mixture.   I just sort of laid it on top.  Everything was semi-stuffed.

Trust me, the photos in the recipe did not look like this.  It all tasted fine and I got two meals out of the concoction.   But, the simplicity that Hello, Fresh and other services like it are pushing is not there.   We launched the space shuttle with less drama.

One sidelight of it all:  Because my kitchen was a mess afterwards, I decided to outsource my dessert.

Hello, Hot Fudge Sundae.

Dinner last night:  Leftover turkey chiles relleno.