Last week I had the pleasure of test driving the Daily Dish, a meal delivery service that gives you all the ingredients you need, as well as the recipes, to whip up four delicious, easy-to-make meals at home. They have three different meal plans for you to choose from, Classic, Low carb and Vegetarian and while all the options looked good I went the low carb route ‘cos I generally try to ensure there’s a bit of protein in everything I eat. Also, the week I was doing it, the low carb menu had bacon-wrapped haloumi fingers on it. Yum!

I placed my order online the week before for the Low Carb menu for two: Four meals for two people for R700 which equals R88 a meal. (Each menu has it’s own price point with the price per meal decreasing if you order for four people as opposed to two).

The following Monday my ingredients and recipes arrived bright and early in a big brown box. Everything was fresh-looking and carefully packaged, the recipes were beautifully printed and including piccies and the ‘intro card’ even listed a suggested order in which to eat everything to ensure optimal yumminess. So far, so very impressive.

Meal-wise, I was looking at mustard-flavoured chicken breasts on wilted spinach, bacon-wrapped haloumi with garlic buttery green beans, sweet potato and lamb sliders (burgers) and sirloin strips in an Asian-flavoured broth.

Being a single person, I planned to share the meals with my cousin Pete who lives in the same block as me but he’s a busy DJ who spends half his life at Caprice so, as it turned out, he only got to eat one, the chicken. I’ve never really had a way with chicken so I don’t really like to eat it at home but Daily Dish’s heavenly garlic, wine, cream, mustard, lemon and herb-infsued recipe ensured, what I thought, was a restaurant-quality meal that I’ll definitely be making again.

Pete liked it too, declaring it ‘very nice’ and, considering he’s the lovechild of Simon Cowell and Gregory House MD, please know that’s the equivalent of ‘unicorns danced across my palate’.

As for me, I thought I’d like the haloumi or steak the best (I’m a slut for cheese as well as Asian flavors) but – surprise, surprise – the lamb burgers rocked my world. (Click on the links for the recipes.)

Something about the delicate garlicky flavour of the non-fatty-tasting patties mixed with the sweetness of the potato and the piquantness of the horseradish sauce just did it for me. This is another dish I’ll definitely make once more, especially since I still have four more lamb burger patties sitting in my freezer. That’s another nice thing about ordering Daily Dish’s 2-person menu as a singleton – you can eat one portion for supper and the other for lunch or simply freeze it for another day. This is why I kind of saw it as an eight portion plan as opposed to a 4 portion one.

Anyway, I’m currently saving like a mofo for both a bond and an impending overseas holiday so I’m in the ‘poor house’ for a while. But if I had money to spare I’d happily use Daily Dish again. I loved learning how to make new meals, I adored that everything was easy to make but looked incredibly impressive once cooked (they’d even send you various leaves etc to act just as mooi garnish, sommer). Most of all I loved that each and every dish was seriously delicious – not a single dud in the bunch.

I’ve had many people chat to me about the service after spotting it on my Instagram and one of them said something like ‘It’s not really sustainable, is it? Once you learn the recipes you can stop using the service, right?’ I don’t agree with that, however. To me, Daily Dish isn’t about learning how to cook. It’s about wanting to, but not having the time to carefully plan meals and buy all the ingredients in a way that there’s isn’t wastage. This is my downfall. I often buy a whack of groceries and then end up watching more than half of it rot in my fridge as I might’ve needed just a dash of cream and then sit with a full tub and nothing to do with it, especially since I have avos that require eating ASAP and must now run off to get the ingredients for guacamole while the Cos lettuce I’d already bought to make Caesar salad are starting to wilt. You get the idea, right? And you can guess who’s now eating gauc-filled cos-lettuce cups for lunch and cream-based pasta for the next two days, can’t you?

Anyway, if you’ve been considering giving Daily Dish a bash yourself and have been sitting on the fence, know that I give the service a very happy two thumbs up.

Win! Win! Win!

Want to win a Daily Dish box from any menu for 2 0r 4 people valued between R600 and R1000 (depending on which box you choose)? There are three ways to enter but you can only enter each way once.

*Follow Daily Dish on twitter and drop me a tweet saying ‘Hey @lipglossgirl! I’d love to win a ready-to-cook meal box with @dailydishforyou’ and include the link to this post.

*Follow myself and Daily Dish on Instagram, share a pic of your, ahem, ‘uninspired’ meal and say ‘Hey @lipglossgirlxoxo! I’d  much rather win and eat with @dailydishforyou.’ (It’s sad I can’t enter myself as I’d totally win in that today’s lunch was chakalaka-flavoured baked beans eaten from the tin. Clearly my Daily Dish glory days are long gone.)

*Like Daily Dish on Facebook and post a comment below telling me what ‘saddo’ meal you have lined up this week and why you’d much rather be eating Daily Dish.

Daily Dish operates in select suburbs in Cape Town, Jozi and Pretoria. Check their site to see if yours is one of them. If you win but aren’t in one of those areas, know you’re going to have to transfer your prize to a friend who is. This competition closes on Tuesday COB.

Good luck!

Love, love

Leigh

Update: Congrats to Sean D on winning this awesome prize. And to everyone else – your turn could be next!