JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Through this new yahoogroup I’ve joined, I learned today about Dream Dinners . The topic thread was freezing dinners/cooking in advance, and this franchise provides recipes, ingredients and location so people can come and prepare meals to take home and freeze: 12 dinners for less then $200.

We’ve been cooking and freezing dinners once a month for the past 6 years. In that time, we’ve perfected it to know what tastes best, what our families like, and what freezes great. The benefits are so numerous that we can’t imagine being without our freezer dinners!

All you have to bring is your pans (based on you meal selections, we’ll tell what you need to bring)! We provide Ziploc Bags for the items that don’t need pans..

There’s one near us, in Poulsbo. Not sure that this is something that would work for our family. Browsing through the menu, I spy quite a few entrees that wouldn’t fit our lactose-free family diet. And freezing meals hasn’t worked well for me. We like stir-fry and I find that the veggies don’t keep their crispness after a stint in the cooler. Although I don’t itemize our grocery spending per meal, also the price seems a bit high compared to what we would feel comfortable spending for dinners.

But it was fun to learn and read about it. I’ve heard about books that offer freezer recipes, cook-once-a-month-for-the-whole-month kinds of ideas, but I’ve never heard of a place, a franchise chain, that helped people prepare dinners in advance. I suppose it would be healthier, easier and cheaper than going out to eat each night. And it could be a fun social event to go make a bunch of meals together with friends. Interesting idea – I wonder how well it will do: here’s a recent Puget Sound Business Journal article on the business aspects of this local franchise that started in Seattle in 2002 and is now expanding across the country.