"Assisted Living"

 

I put the title of this post in quotation marks because we have no plans for moving into "continued care" just yet.  We had scheduled a visit to Stonebridge, a retirement community, just before Covid hit and that was cancelled.  Then, under the circumstances, living in a community did not seem like a good idea.

I have a new friend here at our apartment complex who is my walking buddy.  She refers to anything you do at our age to make life easier as "assisted living."  So take-out meals are thus "assisted living."  We have joked that pre-cut cheese at the supermarket is "assisted living."

And now, Sunbasket meals are our "assisted living."  I have complained about meal planning and preparation.  I don't enjoy cooking as much as several of my friends do.  But I enjoy eating and thus meals need to be planned and prepared.  Laura and Michael gave us a generous gift certificate to Sunbasket, the meal kits they use, and last night we made our first meal.

The box arrived at our door on Monday afternoon.  We had decided to go with "Chef's Choice" and take what was offered for two meals each week.  You can make changes up to the previous Wednesday at 3 pm.  Chicken yakitori was our first meal.  Jim agreed to be my sous chef and help in the preparation.  I assigned him to make the rice.  His first question was how do you rinse the rice?  Fair enough--not something he had done before and I never do when cooking.  I cut the chicken and scallions and put them on skewers.  They needed to be sauteed in oil and I was uneasy about getting the raw chicken cooked well enough so I covered the pan to let them steam a bit. Jim's next task was to cut the broccoli into one inch pieces.  We disagreed on what that meant because I knew that the pieces were too large to stir fry quickly.  I put the chicken in the oven at a low temperature to keep it warm until the rice and broccoli were done.   The rice seemed much too watery after cooking the 20 minutes they specified so we took the top off and let the water evaporate.  

The instructions were all laid out for us on a little card and in my phone app but I felt I still needed to improvise some and call on my cooking experience. 

We plated the rice, skewers, and broccoli and it did look quite lovely.  There was teriyaki sauce for dipping.  It was tasty enough.  

We agreed it was an eating adventure if nothing else.  Tomorrow we will try the sausage tacos and next week our two meals will be Korean BBQ meatballs and teriyaki beef burgers.  The side dish of baby bok choy is iffy for us and kale and orange salad may also be iffy.  But we will give it a try.  

There was still a fair amount of work in the preparation so we may try their Fresh and Ready meals which just need to be popped into the microwave.  I would think they would be better than frozen Lean Cuisine meals because they use fresh and organic ingredients.  There is also the Lean and Clean meals which avoid carbs and are lower in calories. We shall see.  More experimentation will be coming and there will be more eating adventures and more blogs to update!

February 3  update

Sausage tacos tonight.  I didn't think I was a fan of Italian sausage (Jim really is!) or green peppers but I have to admit it was pretty tasty.  And I think we made a better cooking team tonight too.  Stay tuned for next week!  If I convince anyone else to give it a try, email me so we can both get a deal.  Or you may want to wait until we try a few other meal plans--or maybe even another meal kit provider entirely.