Not cooking (sort of)

I recently decided that I should do less cooking. In normal times - or are we just saying past times now, given that we’re now the ‘new normal’? – anyway, Before All This, we ate out quite a bit, so planning and cooking two meals a day, seven days a week for however long we’ve been doing this for now, was wearing a bit thin. But even with restaurants starting to re-open, we’re not ready to go back to them just yet. So that leaves having food delivered. We’ve had a couple of take-aways, but we’ve also ventured into the world of pre-prepared cook at home meals.


Those of you who partake in Saturday night Confined Cocktails may remember Katy’s story about the Great Lobster of Rye a few weeks back. Now I love lobster, so I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I was therefore easy prey to an ad that popped up somewhere on social media for Haar restaurant, which promised to deliver me a pre-prepared lobster, all the way from Scotland.


Indeed, not just a lobster, but a whole meal. Dressed crab with Asian-style salad, lobster with butter sauce, new potatoes with seaweed butter and broccoli with smoked mayo. Plus the option to add extras like wine, bread and Haar’s own pre-mixed cocktails (They sadly haven’t yet found a way of safely transporting their signature dessert, banoffee pie). Neither of us are keen on broccoli, but we still ordered.

Of course we ordered cocktails

The meals are dispatched once a week, for delivery on Friday. The whole thing arrives packed in a cool box, complete with cooking instructions. Preparation is pretty easy: the crab is ready to eat, and all you need to do with the salad is add the dressing. The bread is best warmed up in the oven for five minutes (it was some kind of cornbread, and was delicious). The potatoes and lobster are essentially pre-cooked and just need to be warmed up in the oven, for 30 and 10 minutes respectively. The butter sauce needs to be whisked with some boiling water. The only slightly complicated bit is the bloody broccoli, which has to be blanched and then pan fried, with seasoning. However, once it’s been doused in the smoked mayo, it was – by the standards of the evil green stuff – actually quite nice.

Crab and salad starter

Overall, the meal was delicious, and, while not as easy as sitting down in a restaurant and having people bring you stuff, not exactly hard work to prepare. It was also the kind of meal I would never cook from scratch myself. It doesn’t come cheap – the box we had cost £60 plus delivery, plus any extras like bread and cocktails. That said, it’s still cheaper than that actual restaurant meal would be.

Bread!

I think we will try more services like this, if we can find others that will deliver to us in Canterbury (there seem to be lots which are London-only, although Cote at Home is nationwide – they’re probably the next to try) – in fact, I’ve already ordered a Bacon Naan Kit from Dishoom. Even as things re-open, there’s no way we’ll be eating out as much as we used to. We’ve now actually been into some shops, and there are a couple of restaurants with outdoor terraces we will probably try, but I’m still not sure about being inside anywhere for an extended period, unless cases of the virus fall more.( Although Canterbury itself is relatively quiet, there are still hotspots near to us in Kent.) It feels like a good way to try and keep restaurants going, without actually exposing ourselves to too much risk.


If you want to check out Haar at Home, this is their website: https://haarathome.co.uk/collections/national-deliveries