My husband and I don’t exactly agree on the importance of different household aesthetics.
He hates scented candles, Febreze-type sprays, and any other kind of “room fragrance”; I hate the overwhelming smell of dog that, left unchecked, pervades our house.
So I’ve tried various types of “unscented” products, and we also cook all the time, so hopefully our house smells more like roasted garlic or baking bread and less like our golden retriever mix. It’s a decent compromise.
I care more about germs (so I make sure, at the very least, the bathroom and kitchen are cleaned daily); he cares more about clutter (so he, like Sisyphus, attempts to keep our front table clean even though the kids and I throw everything on there every time we walk through the door, meaning it’s always covered in worksheets, water bottles, unopened junk mail, snack wrappers, etc.).
And then there’s the issue of cooking. As I said, we both like to cook and always have. But Robert likes to cook in a much more cosmopolitan way than I do: In an ideal world, he would browse several markets to get what looked best that day and then come home and prepare an elaborate feast of several courses, all requiring peeling and dicing and braising and so on.
I enjoy doing that every once in a great while, too. But I also love shortcuts and sheet pan meals and the Instant Pot and pre-shredded cheese.
Most nights, Robert does the cooking, which is fine with me. I wander around the kitchen while he preps stuff, drinking a glass of wine and occasionally stealing olives or walnuts or little slivers of whatever vegetables he’s cutting. If he’s not feeling in the mood to cook, I can usually throw a quick pantry meal together or just make pizza rolls/sandwiches/cheese and crackers for the kids.
But lately, now that he’s fully vaccinated and restaurants are lifting their restrictions, he is starting to have several business dinners every week, and this means I am increasingly having to cook dinner for myself and the kids.
Because I hate grocery-shopping and meal-planning, I’m starting to toy with the idea of a meal kit delivery service.
My husband thinks this is blasphemous. Why would I want someone else to plan a menu for me and send me potentially dodgy meat and produce? Don’t I want to squeeze my own avocados and see what meat looks freshest?
But see, I don’t. I don’t want to do any of that. I am happy to cook, but I don’t want to do the rest of it.
I love a good gimmick, and I love the idea of all of my food delivered to me in a carton, neatly labeled with step-by-step instructions.
The idea of picking a meal kit service, though, is pretty daunting.
Does anyone have one that they use and love? If so, please tell me in the comments.
Bonus points for anything that smells delicious enough to cover up the smell of dog that lingers in my house!
