People keep trying to make suppertimes easier – supermarkets want to deliver food to me, various companies want to pre-cook it for me, others want to help me lose weight with it. And now Spoonfed Suppers has joined the crowd with a website that offers to do all my meal-planning too.
Spoonfed is the idea of 28-year-old Caroline Dean, who used to work long hours in banking and desperately wanted to be able to cook a quick, healthy dinner when she got home. Instead she found herself traipsing around the supermarket, then pulling out her cookbooks and agonising over weights, measurements and nutritional content. Why was there no one planning this sort of thing on her behalf, she wondered? When she left banking, she decided to take up the challenge.
The Spoonfed website gives you a list of the staple foods that your kitchen should contain (flour, pasta, gravy granules etc) and then a shopping list is emailed to you every Friday. From the Monday, a daily recipe for a main course for two will arrive in your inbox; no meal takes longer than 30 minutes, or has more than 550 calories and 10g of saturated fat, and by the end of the week you should have fulfilled your nutritional requirements. What's more, the site, which has been running for only a few months and still has a fairly small takeup rate, is free, though Dean is looking into charging in the future. I sign up on the spot.
The next Friday my first shopping list arrives; I head out, ignoring my qualms about the requirement for four chicken breasts (my butcher thinks people should buy chickens whole) and about purchasing king prawns (I try not to think about devastated mangrove swamps), and prepare to surrender control. I will let others tell me what to do. Instead of worrying about dinner, I'll devote more of my time to world peace.
This enchantment with Spoonfed Suppers lasts right up until the moment I begin the actual cooking – first up, a goats cheese and vegetable pizza – when a strange truculence overcomes me. I have forgotten how much (as a couple of driving instructors and my husband have all pointed out) I hate being told what to do, and the idea that someone is taking over my kitchen and bossing me about, telling me what to buy, what to cook and how to cook it is surprisingly hard to take.
Moreover I may not whiteboard my meal plan for the week, but there is a sort of ad hoc structure to it – among the many variables that need to be included are leftovers from Sunday roast, veg box arriving on Wednesday, husband working until 8.30pm four days a week, small boys with large appetites, parents, friends and social life. The idea that someone else can just fire recipes into this spaghetti junction of planning is, I fear, very misplaced.
The pizza turns out to be delicious. My qualms are eased. The following night we have wonderful Moroccan chicken kebabs with couscous, and the night after that I learn that coq-au-vin can taste amazing without homemade stock, flamed spoonfuls of brandy and three hours over the stove.
But towards the end of the week disaster strikes – we're out for the night, and the one after that. Suddenly there's a fridge full of leftover food. Sure, I hear you saying caustically, how hard would it have been to have thought ahead and not bought those prawns that are now rotting away? But, of course, the whole point of doing this is that I shouldn't have to think ahead.
Clearly Spoonfed Suppers is perfect for certain people; Dean tells me she has received letters from some of her happy customers, and I have already recommended it to my mum, who is tired of inventing new meals for my dad each night. The recipes – the ones I get around to cooking – are all straightforward and extremely tasty, and overall the menu cards give me ideas for dinners that I would never normally have contemplated: seared venison with blackberry sauce, paprika prawns and green bean saute.
But, while I am grateful for the suggestions and for the kindly meant attempt to ease my daily existence, I will be signing off here. Cooking in my household just can't be squeezed into a routine; the rackety mayhem of my life needs to be able to accommodate days when dinner is an Elizabeth David recipe that I've fiddled with for hours, and days when it consists of a bottle of wine and a bag of Haribo. Dealing with world peace, sadly, will have to be deferred.