Cauliflower Rice Is The New Purple Cabbage

One of the joys of my time of life is the simplicity of mealtime. No longer do the kiddies gather around the table. Nowadays it is just the two of us, and meals are easy.

Recently I have been going through our monthly expenditures, classifying the money we spend: food, entertainment, utilities, you know the routine. I was shocked, and somewhat embarrassed, to note the enormous sum we spend on food each month. Most of that, I am afraid, is due to the fact that we eat out a good bit. After all, when it is just the two of us, it takes very little persuasion to convince us that eating out is the sensible alternative. (If Kathy cooks, I do dishes, and vice versa, so every meal at home is work for both of us.) As for grocery shopping, Kathy tends to buy the non-gmo, all organic, farm-to-table foods: in other words, the expensive stuff. As best I can tell, the major advantage to buying organic foods is that you get to pay more for it.

But another serious contributor to our food bill is the food delivery service. Currently we are with Green Chef, our fourth meal delivery service. As with the other three services, Green Chef provides us with three meals each week. The foods are, of course, non-gmo, organic, farm-to-table. Each of the food delivery services genuflects to the trendy gods.

Our first service, and in many ways our best, was Blue Apron. I learned a good bit about cooking from the excellent recipes and hints that accompanied those meals. Blue Apron provided absolutely everything you needed to cook each meal, except for three items: salt, pepper, and olive oil. If the recipe called for a pinch of Latvian ossenfay and 1.34 grams of Bulgarian shafafa, you simply had to look in the box to find a sealed plastic bag containing a pinch of Latvian ossenfay and 1.34 grams of Bulgarian shafafa.

The Blue Apron meals were delicious, even the ones that had chicken as the meat. (I have eaten so much yard bird in my lifetime that I now avoid it whenever possible.) But there were downsides to Blue Apron. The recipes involved a good bit of preparation. There were no shortcuts. It would take 45 minutes to do two hamburgers and fries. You would wash the potatoes peel the potatoes, slice the potatoes, season the potatoes, and bake the potatoes, followed by chopping the onion, chopping the garlic, slicing the tomato, adding in the seasoning blend, forming the patties, and grilling the burgers. Of course one cannot forget the buttering and toasting of the buns. Yes, the burgers and fries were delicious, but hardly worth 45 minutes in the kitchen. And the meals were selected with taste, not calories, in mind. A delicious Blue Apron meal could screw up your calorie count for the day.

Toward the end of our association with Blue Apron, the calorie problem was partially resolved as Blue Apron began shrinking the sizes of their portions. That was just fine with Kathy, but it left me a tad hungry, after burning all those calories with the chopping and slicing.

Hello Fresh was our second service. Food preparation time with Hello Fresh was less than with Blue Apron, as the recipes were simpler. What killed Hello Fresh for me was yard bird. Initially, we were receiving one fish, one beef, and one chicken meal each week. Kathy tried to get them to substitute pork for the chicken, but invariably we would still receive chicken each week. After the third or fourth conversation with them about the chicken, we decided to move on.

The third service was nice, and each meal was very convenient, but the variety just was not there. After a few weeks we found ourselves repeating meals, something that had never happened with the first two services in the years we were with them. I will not name the service because they did provide good food, and I do not want to bad-mouth them.

Our current service, Green Chef, seems to be perfect: simpler recipes than with Blue Apron, sufficient portions for a large man like me, fewer calories, and a good variety. Unfortunately, yard bird still shows up from time to time, but I am learning to live with it. There is one thing I have noticed, and I noticed this with both Blue Apron and Hello Fresh: they tend to get into ruts with some of the vegetables. By the time we left Blue Apron, we were having purple cabbage with every meal. The fad of the moment with Green Chef is cauliflower rice, which is not even rice.

Rice contains starch, which is a good thing if you are not on a low carbohydrate diet. Cauliflower does not contain starch, which is a bad thing if you are not on a low carbohydrate diet. Granted that one hour after eating rice I start to get hungry again, but with cauliflower rice, that interval reduces to about twenty minutes. That is just not a good thing, to be hungry so soon after a meal.

The country seems to be fixated these days on the vaccine for the Wuhan Flu. Have you had your shots? It seems to me that the government is wasting a fantastic opportunity to increase the vaccination rate. All they have to do is find the salesman who convinced Green Chef to include cauliflower rice with every bloody meal. Find this guy, put him in charge of marketing flu shots to America, and soon we will have a 100% vaccination rate.

And then, with Green Chef no longer under the influence of this mad marketing genius, I will be able to get some real rice with a meal!