Our food bag(s)

There was more than the usu­al grumbling on Twit­ter this week when the Wel­ling­tonista (slash some of the indi­vidu­als con­tained with­in) tweeted about the food bags they received from My Food Bag. Here is the thing: in order to be able to review some­thing, we have to see it/hear it/taste it/use it. So yes of course we accept free­bies. We always aim to make it very clear when we have been giv­en some­thing rather than pay­ing for it. We only write good things about some­thing if it’s actu­ally good. And My Food Bag is very good at what it does.

If  you’re unfa­mil­i­ar with the concept:

“By bring­ing you new recipes, ideas and ingredi­ents each week, we want to take the chore out of cook­ing. We’re repla­cing that sense of dread as to what you’re going to cook, with eager anti­cip­a­tion of what might be in your weekly food bag.”

The recipes are planned out by Nadia Lim, who we enjoyed at Wel­ling­ton on a Plate last year, and the com­pany is chaired by Theresa Gat­tung, who whatever you may have thought of her time at Tele­com is doing really really great stuff with Wel­ling­ton SPCA now.

To cov­er our bases/cater to our wider audi­ence, I played the role of a child­less yup­pie and got the gour­met food­bag designed for two people, and Martha took the clas­sic one for four people. She’ll share her exper­i­ences at the bot­tom of this post.

Joanna’s thoughts on the gourmet bag

I am very much the tar­get mar­ket for this. I love to cook, but but when I get home from work it’s gen­er­ally pretty late and I lack inspir­a­tion. Giv­en that I accept I won’t own a house any­where I want to live until my par­ents die, I have an okay­ish amount of dis­pos­able income that I like to spend on decent things. Often it’s easi­er to just go out for din­ner rather than cook for one, so I was excited by the pro­spect of hav­ing everything there ready for me.

My first thought on unpack­ing the bag was wow, this is a lot of food, and it’s pack­aged beau­ti­fully. All the pro­duce was lovely and fresh, and the meat was of gor­geous qual­ity – snap­per caught off Waiheke Island, Free­dom Farm pork, and free range chick­en . I liked how almost everything was pre-meas­ured (obvi­ously bought in bulk and then redone for indi­vidu­als). The recipe cards and folder were pretty to look at, and there were extra treats included, like scorched almonds and a lovely-smelling candle. Fun! The deliv­ery woman offered to put it in the kit­chen for me too, and was super friendly, which was an added bonus.

The gour­met food­bag is $140, includ­ing deliv­ery, which works out to be $17.50 per serving (not count­ing leftovers).  That’s not cheap, but if you break it down fur­ther, it starts to become more jus­ti­fi­able – Count­down charge $13 for deliv­ery, and not hav­ing to do the shop­ping or plan­ning cook­ing saved me at least two hours (and I gen­er­ally put my time at $25 an hour when think­ing about things like wheth­er clean­ers are worth it, etc).  Then there’s the vari­ety and qual­ity of the ingredi­ents. I put three kinds of herbs in the bul­gar wheat salad – that would cost $12 alone at the super­mar­ket, and that’s before you get star­ted on the feta and the pre­served lem­on, things you can­’t actu­ally buy in small amounts.  Plus, at the end of the week there were leftover veges, and if I was a per­son with a smal­ler appet­ite, there would have been more din­ners that I could have taken for lunches. How­ever, the fresh­ness of the food­bag played against this a little bit too, because no one wants to be the dick reheat­ing fish at work, and also, microwaved ven­ison does­n’t appeal. The bul­gar wheat salad made a faaab­ulous lunch though.

If I had a part­ner who had a sim­il­ar income to me (pub­lic ser­vant salary, noth­ing glam­or­ous), I would def­in­itely be sign­ing up to get a bag once a fort­night, because it would mean I’d be guar­an­teed to eat my veges (rather than miss­ing the veget­able mar­kets because I’m too hun­gov­er) and a wide vari­ety of food. It saved me money in that I did­n’t have to go out for din­ner (oh the human­ity, I know) so that was a sav­ing on booze and tax­is and stay­ing out for “just one more drink” etc. I don’t recom­mend hav­ing friends over to din­ner for four nights in a row unless you have a dish­wash­er though.

Since I don’t have a part­ner, order­ing a food­bag reg­u­larly will remain a dis­tant dream, but I may do it when I am sched­uled to be very busy but have com­pany planned. Or altern­at­ively, you might see this and real­ise that you want a food­bag too, and you could leave a com­ment, and we could fall in love and move in togeth­er and  serve My Food­bags at our wed­ding?

Martha’s thoughts on the classic bag

I was stoked to snaffle this tri­al. I have three chil­dren and while I’ve always been a good cook,  frankly the joy of pro­du­cing a meal every day has morph­ed into being  a fairly tedi­ous chore. Hav­ing My Food Bag make the decision each day about what we’d be eat­ing was lib­er­at­ing.

The bag isn’t cheap,  each meal is about $37 ($189 for five days). I did a tally on the Count­down web­site to see how much the food would cost, and it came in bang on $188. I think the reas­on each day costs as much as it does is that the por­tions are huge. We had leftovers every day, enough for the kids’ school lunches, and enough to cater for occa­sion­al guests.

As Joanna men­tioned it also includes all the ingredi­ents you need for each meal, so while I might make some jolly nice cur­ries at home I prob­ably would­n’t go out and buy lem­on­grass and kaf­fir lime leaves each time, and it was these touches that made the meals deli­cious. The qual­ity of the food was great. Where pos­sible it seemed they’d sourced organ­ic, in fact the items that were organ­ic they prob­ably could have got away with not (rice, tomato paste), but I was pleased that they’d made the effort. Everything is cooked from scratch by the con­sumer, the bags don’t include premade sauces (except chut­neys), so you are actu­ally cook­ing, you’re just not think­ing. Glen is a very com­pet­ent cook, but does­n’t really rev­el in menu plan­ning, and he was very pleased with the meal he cooked, a steak and orzo salad.

It’s prob­ably obvi­ous by now that I’m sold on the concept. Hav­ing seen the sheer quant­ity of  food it actu­ally does seems like great value. I can­not jus­ti­fy hand­ing over all my cook­ing unfor­tu­nately, but we’ll be going for the fort­nightly option for sure.