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.