All Hail Kale and Chef Roxie

13 Feb, 17

Beginning when I was 13, I made dinner at least twice a week for my family. My parents both worked. My mother was an impromptu kind of cook. I liked to plan ahead, reading recipes and making sure that we bought the right ingredients during our weekly grocery shopping. Being a middle child, I also enjoyed the status that part-time family chefing brought. My older sister couldn’t boil rice. My younger sister made one dish, a mysterious ground beef meal she called “Maggie Mold.” My meals were tasty. At the time seemed exotic, Fettucini al Fredo, Chicken Moutard, burgers with loads of blue cheese. One of the best parts of being the part-time family chef was, on the nights I cooked, I didn’t have to lift a finger to cleanup. I loved watching my sisters buss the table and load the dishwasher.

Cut to last fall. My husband and I realized that our daughter, Roxie, 11, not only didn’t cook, she was kitchen resistant. We tried a variety of ways to remedy this. The one that seemed to hold the most promise was to assign her the role of family chef one night a week. Her reaction surprised us. Roxie’s kitchen resistance gave way to mealtime ambition that shot through the roof. The girl, who preferred pasta and meatballs, no sauce, was suddenly shopping, prepping, making sushi and baking Quiche Lorraine. The two major stumbling blocks to Roxie’s newfound kitchen ambition were cost and time. (After several hours of shopping and heavily-assisted prep time, we’d find ourselves exhausted, starting dinner past 9:30 on a school night.) Homework and other projects took over. Roxie’s cooking extravaganzas became more rare. Slowly we returned to status quo, me making dinner four or five times a week, a restricted repertoire of about a dozen meals, interspersed with bouts of what can only be described as kitchen foraging.

Enter HelloFresh.

Recommended by friends, who like us, thrive on healthy fresh ingredients, mealtime variety and leftovers, we decided to try HelloFresh’s Family box, 3 meals for 4 people.

Roxie was skeptical. The next kitchen conquest she’d had in mind was Surf and Turf. (I can still imagine overpriced lobsters crawling up the kitchen cabinets.) But when the HelloFresh box arrived, Roxie was intrigued.

There are the fun food facts, who knew there’s more flavor in the oils of a lime peel than in its juice? Each meal is perfectly packaged with all of the necessary ingredients. And along with each meal, comes an easy to follow, well-designed recipe card. Roxie chose first to conquer Perfect Penne Bake with chicken sausage, which included one ingredient she was not a fan of, kale. (Kale chips, yes! Kale in pasta? Not on your life!) But rather than to let her leave it out, I insisted that part of the deal was she had to get as close to the recipe as possible, kale and all.

Roxie accepted the challenge. As soon as she finished her homework, she began Step 1, preheat and prep about ten minutes. She needed some light help—more like of spurts of encouragement—de-stemming the kale and thyme. By Step 2, browning the sausage and boiling the penne, it was still only a little past 7. By the final step, bake and finish, it was 7:20. Roxie had the penne bake in the oven and was peering through the oven window to watch the cheese bubble on top. By 7:30, we were sitting down to enjoy the meal. All ten ingredients, including, yup, the kale.

“I liked the kale more than a thought I would,” Roxie admitted. High praise for a leafy green. And the overall meal? She was proud enough to post a photo of her Perfect Penne Bake to Instagram #HelloFresh.

Sixty minutes in the kitchen, once a week, now seems totally doable for Chef Roxie at an affordable price for her parents without sacrificing healthy ingredients and tasty variety. And maybe the best part was, while Roxie scanned the HelloFresh website to see which recipe she’d try next, her parents cleaned up from her meal.