FAQs

Very, very little. In fact, our food is a great way to pick up skills. We give simple, step-by-step and fool proof instructions for what you need to do and we’ve already done all of the hard work. Sometimes our instructions might be geared for someone who has knife skills or cooking experience, but we also provide instructions for those who don’t (e.g. you can “supreme” an orange or you can “cut the peel and white part off and cut it into pieces”). As you progress in cooking, our kits will progress with you.

Our kits are designed to be cooked anywhere and with very little equipment. Most work great in a camper van, or over a camp stove with standard camping gear. Some may suggest use of a grill, but also allow use of a hot frying pan. Others may suggest a “clay pot” or special pot, but work great in a standard pan too. The food will be great with the most basic tools, but if you have advanced tools you can make it look and taste just like it would in a fine restaurant.

We work hard to keep the fresh ingredients you need on hand to a bare minimum and to ensure flexibility in our recipes so you can use what you already have on hand.

Typically, you will only need 1-3 fresh ingredients for a salad or veggie side. Most kits allow you to make a full meal without needing any fresh ingredients and to then make a second meal using the components of the dish requiring fresh ingredients (e.g. turning a side salad into a meal salad for lunch the next day, etc.).

There are a lot of benefits to you getting to pick up fresh ingredients: (1) any meal kit business that supplies fresh ingredients does so after they sit (from the farm) for minimum 5 days (typically closer to 2 weeks) - fresh vegetables lose nutrients as they sit; (2) choosing your own seasonal veggies from the local grocer, farmer’s market or CSA is one of life’s little pleasures; and (3) as anyone who used Blue Apron can attest, the packaging necessary for fresh ingredients can be obscene.

No, not until you try our food.

Frozen food got a deserved bad reputation starting a generation ago. The frozen food you get in grocery stores, while improving quickly, still has all of the same characteristics. This isn’t because its frozen. It’s because the recipes are poor and the food produced at massive scale. The share of the consumer price that frozen foods producers take home is much lower, typically only 20-40%, than for shelf-stable or refrigerated foods. This means that to be price competitive in a grocery story, frozen food producers can’t produce the same quality that we can as a small scale producer selling direct to consumers.

Critical for us, the quality of frozen food depends almost entirely on how fast it freezes and how it is packaged. Quality also depends on how cold it was stored and to some degree on how it thaws. Today’s technology makes it possible to freeze almost anything and have it come out perfectly preserved. Think about cryogenically frozen human embryos as an example. While we don’t yet go that extreme, our individual component thin packs, laid flat on metal sheet pans in our blast freezer do allow us to freeze most components in minutes. Where quicker freeze time will make a difference, we adapt and in special circumstances may even use dry ice.

There are a few exceptions when it comes to frozen food. Fresh fruits and vegetables are one. The enzymes in fresh fruits and vegetables that break them down continue to work even after the fruits and vegetables are frozen unless they are blanched first or doused in sufficient acid (e.g. lemon juice, vinegar, etc.). That’s why all of the frozen veggies you get have the blanched texture. It’s also why we allow you to bring your own fresh veggies when it matters.

Really fascinating, scientists have found fresh foods frozen shortly after picking will actually have higher levels of nutrients than fresh foods that may take a week or more to go from the farm to your table.

You really won’t believe our food is frozen. It might even blow your mind.

We will communicate via text or email and be sure that we have a plan, whether delaying delivery or delivering in a cooler box that you return to us.

Let us know and we will replace the meal or issue you a refund. We’ll want to learn as much as we can from your concerns so we can improve, but your satisfaction is what matters to us most.