Genius!

The Girl is a hell of a cook. She's admittedly a little particular about how she wants thing to go in the kitchen so I tend ot steer clear of her when she's working, but the results are usually impressive so I'm good with stepping off.

She's also not always in the mood to cook, so she's smart enough to take a Sunday every now and again and make twenty burritos or a couple of batches of soup and throw them into the freezer so she can just pull stuff out, thaw it, and go.

Which is what made her choice a couple of weeks ago to go visit Dream Dinners a little odd. She already does pretty much what they were gonna do for her.

See, Dream Dinners is a place where they do all the prep work and you throw the stuff together, take it home, and freeze the meals until you're ready for a "homecooked" meal without a whole lot of work. It's marketed primarily to women (admittedly pretty much only to women) who fall into one of a few categories:

• guilty about not cooking for their families
• don't have time but want to eat family meals
• can't cook worth a crap unless they've got the recipe and somebody to prep all the ingredients
• need to impress somebody but don't know how to cook
• wanna have a social afternoon with friends while throwing some food together

The Girl fell into the last category and went to the Bridgewater Falls branch a couple of weeks ago. She dropped about $130 to make thirty-some servings of food (she claimed it worked out to $3.50 a serving, but my math put it more at $3.75, but who's quibbling) in a couple of hours.

Her take on the layout is that it was incredibly well-planned. (Warning: all following descriptions are second hand from The Girl to me. Any innacuracies are entirely the fault of the blogger.) They had four large stainless steel tables with frozen cases set into the center of the tables (like you'd see at a pizza prep place - a bin for each ingredient). Each table was set up for a different dish (they have a set menu for the month from which you choose in advance what you'd like to make.) Customers/chefs moved from station to staion following recipes already typed out and nicely laminated.

The ingredients went into ziploc bags, disposable aluminum plans, or little plastic containers which were then labeled with specific instructions on pre-printed stickers with the Dream Dinner logo. Everything was ready to be grabbed and ended up ready to be taken from freezer to oven to plate to gullet.

With only a limited amount of data to back up my statement (one dinner in - pork chops with apples) I can say that they make for a pretty tasty product. Tonight's dinner is their stuffed pasta shells with red sauce, so I'll know more by tomorrow.

The Girl's general impression is that the business is an absolute genius move. I had visions of the workers chopping and slicing, measuring and sorting ingredients before the customer chefs got there, but it turns out they don't even do that. They crack open Sysco packages, pour them into prettier dispensers, and put the dispensers into the freezer tables. They make sure there are water bottles in each customer chef's refrigerator space. They print up the labels for the food packages, and that's about it. Everything's straight out of the Sysco package, and it's all measured by the customer chefs.

Overhead's minimal because they only order as much food as they're going to need for the week. The rent's a little pricey because they're primarily going into affluent areas, and they've got some money sunken into nicely appointed kitchens - but even those don't have ovens or stovetops to make anything. She reported that they've got a microwave in the place, but that's pretty much just to thaw things out (or warm up the enchelada wrappers to make them more pliable when she was there) as needed. There's some employee cost, but that's not even a lot because they're not open when they don't have reservations.

Genius!

The Girl did report that she think she could do as good a job for a slightly lower cost and with slightly higher quality ingredients from The Jungle, but that's because she knows what she's doing. Lots of other folks don't have a clue.

There is another place doing the same basic thing at My Girlfriend's Kitchen but aiming a little younger, a little hipper, a little more social with their styling. The Girl has promised a try through there and a report back (to me - she honestly doesn't pay any attention to my literary daliances here on what she refers to as The Blog - don't worry, it doesn't get jealous of her...much...)

So the overall review is a solid four stars out of five...probably five stars out of five if you can't do the stuff on your own...