Good morning! So you may have noticed me teasing and tweeting about food all week, and you may have thought what is the deal with these food instas?? Well, ask no more, because I’m about to tell you.
Will and I really try to cook healthy meals at home M-F. It’s really amazing what a feat getting healthy, protein-and-produce-based whole foods into our bodies on a regular basis is with two busy work schedules. (Isn’t it so annoying how one night you can make a gorgeous plate of salmon with dill and lemon sauce, asparagus, and beets, and it’s delicious; but then the next day you finish the leftovers for lunch and you have to cook food and feed yourself again?? Such a struggle.) Inevitably, there are nights once in a blue moon when we fail. And when we fail, we fail hard, and we aren’t even going to walk our butts to the nearest Sweetgreen. I cannot tell you how many times we have spent way too many hangry minutes searching in vain for healthy delivery options in our neighborhood, only to realize there are really no healthy delivery options in our neighborhood. Enter Galley Foods.
What it Is
Luckily, the 21st-century yuppie has a lot of food start-up shortcut options for Plan A, and we’ve tried most of them. Let’s review the landscape.
- Meal planning services: After Hayley tipped me off to this genius, this is what we use the vast majority of the time. When we were first married, the Sunday struggle over deciding what we were going to eat that week, how we could buy ingredients that were seasonal and would work in multiple meals, and creating a list and a plan was often just all too much. Thankfully, we found this subscription service that does all the planning for you. They give you a paleo menu that artfully weaves seasonal produce and protein throughout the week using all ingredients economically. Plus there are instructions for everything, so it takes all thinking out of the equation. But you still have to go to the grocery store and do all the tedious chopping, prepping, and cooking.
- Meal subscription services: You know who these guys are. And it’s a great idea. This cuts out the grocery shopping portion from the above, but you’re still doing the cooking, which is still a huge time commitment and mess.
- Meal delivery services: Today I introduce to you, take-out that isn’t really take-out. Galley Foods has finally just carried us to the finish line by preparing chef-made, preservative-free, fresh meals out of whole foods that are delivered to your door with very little prep or mess, and zero thought. This is the healthy food delivered to our door we have been searching for all along!!
How it Works
Here’s how a night in the life with the miracle that is Galley Foods goes:
- You order off their menu and select a half-hour delivery window. The menu has all of the ingredients for each meal listed, including gluten-free, nut-free, vegetarian, and dairy-free options. You can order up to a week in advance.
- You get a sweet pdf in your inbox telling you how to prepare you food just minutes before it arrives. (Really, though, it’s so easy this is unnecessary. It just feels fancy.) It gives you instructions on how to plate your food if you’re trying to impress or if it’s just you and you’re just trying to survive Monday.
- The delivery person texts you when they’re on their way to tell you to preheat the oven.
- YOUR FOOD IS DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR. Our delivery person has always been timely, tip is already included, and there has been no hangry “where is the foooooood?” frustration.
When your food arrives, it looks like this.
- All you do at this point is remove the belly band, lid, and sauces, and put the thing in its biodegradable container in your microwave for 2 minutes or oven for 10 minutes.
Their beer-brined chicken.
Slap those containers on a cookie sheet and set the table, because you have 10 minutes to keep busy.
IGNORE THE SAUCE CONTAINER. Someone I live with, who isn’t Pippa, thought the directions were just too confusing when they said, “remove plastic lid and sauce container.”
- Arrange the easiest dinner ever beautifully on a plate and be proud of all that you’ve accomplished as if you made it yourself. Healthy dinner is healthy dinner, and it did come out of your oven.
Yucatan salmon with pesto, mashed sweet potatoes, and brussels.
- And finally, enjoy the tiny sweet treat of dark chocolate and nuts that accompanies every meal.
Why it’s Awesome
So how is this different than your normal delivery? As you might have heard me mention, it’s healthier. Galley uses whole foods and simple, local ingredients to cook your dinner fresh that evening right here in DC. There’s no weird ingredients or preservatives, and the nutritional facts are listed for each meal. Secondly, there is no prep and about one dish for you to clean up (you know that cookie sheet does not need to be washed with every use). It is insanely convenient, about the same cost as the groceries that would be required to make these meals, and yet there is no planning, shopping, cooking, or mess. Also, in DC you can get wine! (Stupid VA liquor laws.)
And oh yeah, it’s delicious. Seriously so, so good. My charred corn and green beans on Monday tasted like they had just come off the grill. The pesto on my salmon was so tangy. Our crabcakes were fresh from Maryland. We devoured every morsel.
All of these meals were c/o, but the opinions are all my own.
Thank you Galley Foods for sponsoring this post and delivering these meals to us this week! Much like with my planner review, I reached out to them, because this improved my quality of life so much. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t love it! The guys who started the company, Alan and Ian, are extremely communicative and welcome feedback with open arms, so if you have questions or concerns, fire away!
A huge bonus here too was that I was forced to work on my low-light photography skills since I was photographing after work, and looking at my delicious, ready-to-eat dinner was pretty good motivation to figure out those settings fast. Is anyone interested in what I’ve learned so far about the manual settings on my camera? Let me know in the comments!
If you are looking for other ways to make your everyday life easier, check out my planner system and how I keep my online shopping under control.
