Fresh Prep, a B-corporation company delivers healthy, fresh meals.

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For a no-fuss, inexpensive Christmas dinner, or any dinner for that matter, consider the highly rated local company, Fresh Prep.

They deliver ready-to-cook or ready-to-eat kits made with quality ingredients. For example, the Christmas dinner package with a moist, fresh turkey roll (white and brown meat with each slice), stuffing, citrus maple carrots, apple bacon Brussels sprouts, gravy, and artisanal cranberry cherry sauce costs $132.99 for six people or $251.99 for 12.

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The regular menu offers 18 weekly chef-driven dishes such as gremolata whole spatchcock chicken with risotto, panzanella and burrata; Vietnamese beef and noodle salad; roasted Arctic char with green beans, potato mash and miso gravy; and Thai basil beef with coconut rice.

It’s less expensive than ordering from a restaurant, the cost includes delivery with no tipping, and bonus. The company is a certified B-corporation with high social and environmental performance standards (zero waste). Ingredients include antibiotic-free poultry and sustainably sourced seafood. The company has donated over 82,000 meals to community groups.

For more information, visit freshprep.ca.

Delicious reading

Good for a gift. Good for your own quiet-time read about food, interrupted by chuckles.  In the book of essays, Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence (ECW Press), local writer Andrea Bennett says, “When I cook, I make hearty food. For subsistence but, just as importantly, for pleasure. To keep myself alive, and to enrich my life. My goal is to approach these essays from the same place I approach gardening, harvesting, and cooking — with curiosity, with optimism, and in community.”

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Bennett is a talented writer who grabs your attention and takes you on an informative, entertaining ride. For instance, I no longer wonder how aquafaba, the canned chickpea water substitute for egg white, was discovered. A vegan opera tenor wanted to eat île flottante and asked himself what would be as disgusting as a raw egg white. That’s how.

Having once received a 22-kilogram sack of potatoes, Bennett calls the veg “a reliable, flexible cornerstone…so good at adapting to their surroundings, becoming crispy or crunchy, soft and fluffy, even gluey,” and shares recipes for vegetarian shepherd’s pie, pommes Dauphine, and lentil loaf. Insights into food, gardening, the food systems, and culture are shared along with reflections on Bennett’s own life.

It’s a lovely Christmas-time read, in my opinion.

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