Eating In - The Serving Spoon

My turn to cook!

The Serving Spoon

The Serving Spoon bills itself as a "personal chef service." It's a prepared meal delivery outfit that offers a fairly big, rotating menu of entrées and side dishes. Our week of meals came via a Groupon purchase. The steep discount of $85 for $335 worth of food was hard to refuse, so we gave it a shot.

Observations

• Our entrée selections: honey ginger roasted chicken, pesto crusted salmon, turkey meatloaf with mushrooms and gravy, Mediterranean chicken with olives and capers, and stout marinated pork roast with caramelized onions.
• Our side dish selections: roasted sweet potato wedges with smoked paprika, honey glazed carrots with fresh herbs, steamed rice with pine nuts and herbs, roasted mixed veggies, and rosemary roasted red potatoes.
• The first thing I noticed is that the portions (particularly the sides) were quite a bit smaller than I expected. Maybe it matches up with "portions" reported on packaged foods, but it's significantly smaller than restaurant portions. (Of course, maybe this is a good thing, too.)
• Overall the side dishes were pretty decent, but the entrées were just OK. We were able to eat a couple of nights of dinner and a couple days worth of lunches, but we couldn't bring ourselves to finish it all off. The Mediterranean chicken is still in the fridge, and I'm not sure I have what it takes to eat it.
• I initially thought, "This will be like having a personal chef for a week!" Later, I thought "Well, it will hopefully be like getting takeout from a nice restaurant for a week." Then, I settled on, "It will probably taste like food from the grocery store counter... for a week."
• In fact, the experience seemed most like bringing leftovers home from a hotel banquet. All of the food had this generic/industrial kitchen taste that you really only get a hotel banquets or catered events. We definitely got our $85 worth (probably), but if we would have paid full price, this post would've had an entirely different tone.
• Best of all - it made Kathryn appreciated my home cooking that much more, especially my roasted chicken.