Remember meal kits?
There were about 347 companies offering them a few years ago. All the rage. The pitch was simple: Why shop for groceries the old-fashioned way when we can deliver an enormous crate to your house that has 62 pounds of ice and one cucumber?
The appeal was threefold:
1. You did actual professional chef-related chopping. You learned how to julienne, dice, slice and bind up a gash with a paper towel until you could find the bandages, which didn't stick because your hand was too wet from the blood. "Man, that's just not stopping, is it? Should I call someone? No, not the hospital, I mean, like, Domino's?"
2. You could bond with your children as you made meals and they'd learn lots of things, like how to dice, slice, julienne and come to terms with the fact that the loss of your pinkie finger really doesn't affect your manual dexterity. (If the kids were young, you could tell them it grows back.)
3. You got all kinds of different meals to spice up your boring routine. My experience showed they fell in the following groups:
• Chicken from Another Country. What's for dinner? "Madagascar Yardbird!" Sounds exotic; what is it? "Chicken with special spices, served on a bed of herbed rice. Sorry, I bought this from a podcast, it's served on a Casper Mattress of herbed rice."
• Yeah, It's a Hamburger. But you're going to spend half an hour making a garnish in a small bowl, feeling like a pharmacist making the world's smallest salad.