The history of every major civilisation, the novelist Douglas Adams once wrote, passes through three phases. What shall we eat? Why do we eat? And where shall we have lunch?
Add to this the questions popularised and mainstreamed by a thousand fad diets. Am I eating too many carbs? Should I eat more acai berries? What is a superfood?
Choice is hard. As the quintessential Abu Dhabi bachelor, I am confronted daily by these questions. As a busy business journalist, I am also stretched for time, or, as my colleagues may less kindly put it, lazy. Planning meals is a great effort: I’d rather someone else chose for me.
So I tried out a new Dubai-based company called DinnerTime. It provides a weekly box of ingredients and recipes, you do the cooking. This removes the frustration of choice.
Boxes are available for two or four people, at a price of Dh300 for a two-person box or Dh400 for a four-person box, minus a Dh20 discount for subscribers. This makes four meals.
This is a reasonable price: I find it hard to cook interesting things regularly without straying over the Dh80 mark per meal.
The box was filled with fresh vegetables, and generous portions of fresh herbs.
Portion sizes were on the small side, but there’s no reason to stick to the recipe in all cases. Supplementing a meal with a few hundred grams of tabbouleh did the trick. Besides, my appetite is on the generous side.
Meals took around 30 to 40 minutes to cook. This was not too arduous. I enjoy cooking, but evening fatigue often creeps in, especially if I am cooking just for myself. Simple recipes, however, are useful: they impose some discipline on my culinary efforts. Instead of throwing something into the oven before throwing myself on to the sofa, I chopped vegetables and ate better.
It’s a good, cost-effective aid for cooking healthy meals after work in the UAE.
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
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