Pop-Up Pantry brings gourmet meals to your doorstep
Pop-Up Pantry box. Pug not included.
Sometimes, after a long day, you just don’t want to cook dinner. That’s when a service such as Pop-Up Pantry comes in. Pick a meal created by a noted chef, choose a delivery day and presto — you’ve got dinner for two. You’ll need to do some light cooking, but other than that it’s pretty simple. And simple is good.
I ordered the meals from the final round of MasterChef by Christine Ha and Josh Marks. This is a special menu because it’s essentially two, two-person meals in one order. I didn’t realize that at first, so I cooked the entire thing — four servings — at once. At least I had lots of leftovers!
Ha’s meal, which won her the title of MasterChef last season, consists of pork belly (huge slabs!) served with pickled shallots, steamed rice and sauteed kale with mushrooms. The starter is a Thai crab salad, and dessert is apple pie. Marks’ meal starts with cheese soufflés, then moves onto a main of Indian curry hen with steamed rice, and ends with a pecan tart with bourbon caramel.
What the meal looks like before cooking
Slightly burned cheese souffles, apple pie and burned pecan tart
Thai crab salad
The meal
Burned pork belly, left, and Indian curry hen
Even though I burned part of the meal (gah!), I liked what I got and definitely appreciated the large portions. Everything was pretty tasty except for the pecan tart, which didn’t taste like it had any bourbon caramel in it. Preparation was relatively easy. There were quite a few steps involved in this particular meal, but nothing was hard to do as everything was basically precooked.
Note: This meal was complimentary.
