Recently, we’ve been trying to figure out how to reclaim bits of our evening,  specifically the parts that require conversations that include phrases like, “Do I need to go to the store or do we have something for dinner?”

Partially it’s the grocery store time, but partially it’s that I can’t seem to go to the store efficiently if I don’t go in with a strong dinner plan.  What should be a 10 minute surgical strike mission that costs $20 ends up being a 30 minute reconnaissance mission that finds more than I was looking for and costs $50.

We’ve done Dinner’s Ready in the past, but we decided to blaze some new trails.  The first one led to Freshly.  This week, our first Freshly order arrived.

First of all, I didn’t read the web site closely enough.  I saw the pictures of the little TV Dinner looking trays, but somehow in my head I thought that “prepared” meant something like “assembled and ready to put into a skillet or oven.”  In reality, “prepared” means “fully cooked, cut a slit in the film and put it in your microwave for 2 minutes.”  The food is reasonably tasty, but it tends to come out of the microwave a little over cooked.  I’m looking at cooking my third night of it tonight, and I find myself with a bit of an “Oh man, leftovers again” attitude towards it, and at $11.5/serving, I feel I should be a little more excited than that.

All of the services I signed up for deliver on Wednesday at the earliest, which means you can’t really do one of these and say, “Well, at least I’ve got my busy weeknights covered,” which is a bit of a letdown.  Freshly has the delightful added bonus of a Friday at 4pm cancellation deadline, so my attempt to cancel 96 hours in advance on Saturday morning was fruitless, and I’ll have another weekend of leftovers to look forward to.

Verdict: If you really don’t enjoy cooking and just want someone to do it for you so that you can heat it up, this may be the service for you.  They have an array of tasty-looking meals, and the ones we’ve had so far have held their own.  It was not quite what I was looking for, though.