Fresh Reviews - My Food Bag

Photo credit: www.myfoodbag.co.nz

If you follow Craving Fresh on Facebook, you might have seen that our family has been trialling My Food Bag for the past three weeks.

I signed up in a moment of desperation.

I was feeling exhausted by the endless chore of cooking for the family every night, only to then have to cajole them into eating it every night. The range of dinners we were eating was becoming quite limited, as I wanted to make food I knew the kids would eat - but that list was so short.

To get myself out of the rut, I joined My Food Bag and promised myself to cook and serve whatever recipes and food that gave us.

In case you haven't heard of My Food Bag, it's a New Zealand service that provides all the ingredients and recipes you need to make dinners for five weeknights.

The head food chef is dietician, Nadia Lim, so meals are designed to be well-balanced and healthy. (My personal feeling is that the meals rely too heavily on the traditional food pyramid idea of a healthy diet, so feature too many starchy carbohydrates while limiting fat content. However, the free range meats and wide variety of vegetables help compensate for that.)

I've been doing My Family Food Bag, which is designed for young families. Other options are My Classic Food Bag, which is for families with older children, or My Gourmet Food Bag, which is for couples, and only provides four nights' worth of food.

It's been fun and the children have eaten suprisingly more than I expected, although they have turned up their noses at many of the vegetables.

The meat is spectacular. Each week there has been such a range, and over the three weeks we have eaten fish, free range chicken, beef, lamb, pork and turkey, all from gourmet New Zealand companies.

Dinners feature a lot of different vegetables, which is great and has got me and Paul eating many more than we normally would.

The recipes are seasoned with simple, yet delicious combinations of herbs and spices.

My only complaint is that many of them include wheat/gluten, which is something I try to avoid at dinner time as the kids end up having so much of it at other times of the day. Several of the recipes have included bread crumbs, tortillas, Lebanese wraps and pastry.

We always have leftovers, so there has been plenty of food for my lunches the next day.

Sadly, our time with My Food Bag is coming to an end this week, as it is taking too much of our weekly grocery budget. I would love to continue it and think I might do the odd week here and there as I need inspiration during the year.

Have you tried My Food Bag? What did you think of it?