A brilliant business model.

I'm thinking I might do this:

Simply sign up for a session and choose the items you wish to make from our monthly menu. We have fully equipped stations, with fresh ingredients sliced, diced, and ready to go. You simply follow the posted directions, tweak the food to your family’s specific tastes (Don’t like onions? Ditch the onions! Love garlic? Add more!), assemble the meal in the pans and freezer bags we provide, and presto!

Each meal serves 6 people, or can be split into smaller packages for smaller families. We've created family-friendly recipes specially designed to be frozen and heated when you need them. After two hours with us, you can stock your freezer with a number of "ready-to-cook" dishes you made and that your family will love throughout the month.

Sixteen meals-for-three would be $155 - which works out to much less money than takeout food, for better nutrition. And while it would certainly be much cheaper to make and freeze food myself, realistically speaking, I have just enough energy to shop and cook for one set of meals every week, in addition to working full time, gestating (which takes an unbelievable amount of energy), and getting things ready for the baby. I don't think I would have the energy to do two sets of meals from scratch. So it's very appealing to think of someone else doing all the shopping, prepwork, and cleanup.

Looking at their menus, I see plenty of things we would enjoy eating. It looks like it's main course-oriented, and so we'd want to supplement a lot of the entrees with vegetables or bread or rice. But that's easy enough to do at the last minute, and wouldn't take a lot of cooking.

Someone had a fantastic idea, here. What a great business model.

Recipe corner: Old reliables.

curiousangel is learning how to cook some of our favorite quick, easy dinners, so that he can take over some of the cooking after Li'l Critter arrives. Saturday night he made pork chops and red potatoes. Tonight he made spaghetti with meat sauce, with only the occasional pointer from me.

Here's how I we make my our spaghetti:

1/2 pound linguini fini (Yes, I know that means it's not "spaghetti" at all. Hush.)
1/2 pound hot Italian turkey sausage
1/2 jar Classico Cabernet Marinara sauce
1 medium zucchini, diced
1 small red bell pepper, diced

Start water heating for pasta. Remove the sausage from its casings and brown it in a little olive oil over medium heat, breaking it up into small pieces. When the sausage is almost cooked through, add the vegetables and saute until the zucchini is golden. Pour in the sauce and turn the heat down to low. Drop the linguini into the boiling water, boil for six minutes, and drain. Top with sauce, which will be very thick.

curiousangel did a great job. Dinner was delicious. But tragically, the fact that he cooked meant that I had to do his job - the dishes. I guess no clever plan is foolproof.