The mystery surrounding Dream Dinners deepens. The main mystery of why anyone would pay a premium to pretend to cook using inferior ingredients at a "meal assembly center"is completely unfathomable. I still can't quite figure this out, but it appears to be to cooking what the Wingshooters Hunters Preserve is to hunting. (I have much respect for Wingshooters patron Mike Timlin as a baseball player, but Sox hero or no, he hunts like a bitch. The "Dream Dinners Experience?" You drive somewhere, assemble prechopped ingredients, and pay a premium for the privilege:
Meal assembly centers are not necessarily a return to the home-cooked
food generations grew up eating. For one thing, no one actually cooks
at them. The chopped vegetables and frozen meats at most of the centers
come from industrial food suppliers like Sysco, and recipes include
ingredients like canned wax beans and that old hot dish standby, cream
of chicken soup. Nothing is actually cooked on site, although workers
in the back room might chop scallions or slice raw beef into serving
sizes.
The lede for the article runs like this:
SEATTLE —
Jodi Robbins and her family were on a grim dinnertime merry-go-round.Takeout pizza was a mainstay, except on the nights
when Chinese food seemed more appealing. When Ms. Robbins cooked, it was
spaghetti or tuna casserole over and over, with rarely enough time to make a
salad.
Fair enough. As the article says, "Their routine was expensive, fattening and boring." Absolutely. But how does spending a two hour chunk of time at a meal assembly center preparing "a rotating menu of mostly stews and casseroles designed to be assembled
in freezer bags or aluminum trays, then taken home to be baked or
simmered in a single pot," made from cafteria quality ingedients help? This chain seems to be making its bones by adding "inconvenient" to the "expensive, fattening and boring" equation. Also, my objection to this business is not a question of insisting that parents ("Moms" as the Times call them) travel to Brittany to harvest their own fleur de sel, or generally spend more time making meals, and eschew this kind of shortcut -- these meal assembly centers seem distinctly less convenient than making a meal at home, never mind the risk of getting cream of broccoli all over the interior of your Nissan Quest.
The secondary mystery is why the Times continues to recycle this story. Last time it was Hesser, and now she has punted to Kim Severson* and that Salman Rushdie of mac and cheese, Julia Moskin. I vented thus in re Dream Dinners last time, though I hope nobody comes here for stock tips--unaccountably, Dream Dinners appears to be growing more rapidly than Kenny Rogers Roasters. I never thought threre could be a franchise concept that made me nostalgic for Boston Market. Can anyone explain this?
*Severson's post-Katrina NOLA food coverage has been solid, and more importantly, persistent.
Update: Ms. Culi makes it clear she gets it by missing the point. She had me at the soccermoms turned flensers.
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