Hotoffersdaily writes here about the practical side of eating well, with notes from our Hamilton kitchen on meal planning, seasonal produce and feeding a busy household.
People ring the kitchen with the same handful of questions again and again. Rather than repeat ourselves on the phone, we have written the long answers down. Both pieces below come out of things we have actually had to work out for our own staff and customers.
A rotating roster breaks the usual Sunday cook-up completely. Here is how to build a week of food that survives a 2am start, a day off in the middle of it, and the afternoon where you do not know which meal you are meant to be eating.
A cold-climate vegetable that ripened slowly carries more sugar and holds up far better after chilling. That is why our July menu looks the way it does, and why a winter box costs less than a summer one despite using the same kitchen and the same cooks.
Nothing on this blog is written by an agency, and nothing gets published without someone in the kitchen reading it first. Half the drafts never make it out at all, usually because the person who was going to write it got busy on a Friday and never came back to it.
We are not trying to write about every food topic that exists. These four keep producing questions worth a proper answer.
Rosters, school terms and the weeks where nothing goes to plan. How to feed yourself when the calendar is against you.
What is actually good this month in the Waikato, why it tastes better, and how it changes what we cook.
How much food a person actually needs, which is usually less than the packet suggests and more than most people guess.
Why some food survives the fridge and some does not, and what to do about the dishes that keep going rubbery.
Both of the services below are run from the same kitchen on Kahikatea Drive that writes these posts. The blog is a way of explaining how we cook, but the cooking is the point.
Boxes for one person or a whole family, cooked the morning they ship and delivered chilled. Swap any meal up to two days out, skip a week when you are away, and cancel whenever you want. No contract, no joining fee.
Hot and cold trays for teams of ten or more, dropped off before the midday rush with an allergen sheet for the whole floor. Set a standing order and nobody has to think about lunch again.
Not everything worth writing down fits into a full article. Some of it is just a thing we settled on and never stopped doing, so it seems worth passing on.
Everything we cook is designed to reheat at about 160 degrees for fifteen minutes. Blasting it in a microwave on full power is why chilled food gets a bad reputation.
Chilling mutes seasoning noticeably. We salt dishes slightly harder than we would serve them hot, because by the time you eat it, it will taste right.
Some days you want a big meal and some days a small one. Ordering a mix of portion sizes rather than a fixed number of meals usually works out better.
Almost every household has one night a week where cooking is not going to happen. Put the easiest meal in the box on that day and the whole week works better.
We send one email a week with the coming menu, the prices, and a link to whatever we have written lately. If there is no new post that week, you get the menu anyway and that is it.