As someone who is sick and tired of the limited options in my college cafeteria, I was very excited by the prospect of different and even edible meals. DinnerThyme is a website that allows users to receive fully prepped ingredients for a single serve meal It's a meal-delivery service like Blue Apron, but with the added perk of having single-serve portions instead of cooking for two or four. It's delivered right to your door (or mailroom) and all of the ingredients are already pre-portioned, so all you've got to do is cook. Yes, it's really that easy.
The Lowdown
Ordering from DinnerThyme was incredibly simple. I got to pick what meals I wanted off of a menu on their website. The box came within the week and kept the ingredients fresh with insulation and reuseable ice packs. The box comes with a packet of instructions, one page per meal. Each ingredient is labelled with a letter to designate which meal it belongs to. The instructions also tell you if there is anything you need that they didn’t provide. In my case, I needed to provide a sauté pan and some olive oil to cook my meals (this varies based on which meals you choose to order.)
The small bags of ingredients looked pretty overwhelming at first, but the pictures on the instructions looked good enough for me to grab a friend and head to the communal kitchen in my dorm.
Each meal took us under 15 minutes each to cook. Our paper plate-presentation wouldn't necessarily make Gordon Ramsey proud, but we're college students.
Let's Get Cooking
The first meal we made was chicken meatballs chardonnay over pasta and herbs. This was our favorite. The chicken meatballs had an amazing flavor and the pasta and herbs all came together amazingly well.
Next, we made chorizo and spinach gnocchi with roasted peppers. While I'm not a fan of saying gnocchi, because no matter what I'm pretty sure I'm wrong, I am definitely a fan of eating it. Please do not let my terrible photography trick you into thinking that this wasn't super tasty. Trust me. It was.
Then we had jerk-marinated chicken with mango salsa over curry rice. We were given a powder-spice mixture to coat the chicken with, and once it was cooked, the flavor was strong but, the mango salsa was surprisingly a refreshing pair to the chicken and flavorful rice.
Finally, we ended with dessert. Oreo Mousse Cake, to be exact. This one required no baking – all we had to do was take out of the bag and it may have been a little bit smushed but it was pretty darn incredible. I mean it wasn’t The Cheesecake Factory or anything, but I gotta say, it was close. We pretty much licked the (paper) plate on this one
Final Thoughts
So if you're a college kid who wants to escape the cafeteria lifestyle for a night, or you're just someone who wants to cook for themselves, but doesn't want to buy mass-amounts of ingredients, DinnerThyme is just for you.