Houston Village Table

[jscarbor]

With a 2 year old and my wife and I both working and my wife pregnant with are second, time to cook has been tough to come by. I heard about Village Table a year or so ago and have been reluctant to join. I know I can cook better than these people, I just need to prepare better, is what I kept telling myself. Well I haven't been preparing very well, so my wife and I decided to give Village Table a try. I went onto the website and registered and picked the meals i wanted to try. I picked the 8 meal plan for $150. Its basically an entree for 4 adults which is about 32 servings for $150, not bad. You arrive at the site and get ready by washing hands, apron and plastic gloves then look for stations that have dishes you picked. Everything is prechopped for you. You follow some simple intructions, measure here and there then package your meal. Tonight will be are first shot at this with a dish called chicken superb. Its a baked chicken dish with artichokes and cheese. It looks decent enough, I'll let you know how it tastes and keep a running account of the other dishes.

I'll serve it with a veg that I make.

[Kent Wang]

I've been looking at Dream Dinners and Super Suppers in Austin as an event that we can introduce to novice and freshman cooks for the UT cooking club, of which I'm a member. I was introduced to the idea from an article in the Austin Chronicle. Please do keep us posted!

[jscarbor]

Last night we had are first dish from Village Table and.....it wasn't horrible. It was a dish called chicken superb. Its chicken breat atop artichokes with a sauce on it. Bake it for 40-50 minutes. The sauce was a little runny and fairly salty. The chicken stayed nice and moist.

although it wasn't bad I probably wouln't do this dish again.

Next dish is Thai Pork Stew. I'll have that tomorrow.

[jscarbor]

Last week we cooked up the Thai Pork stew. It was a massamam type curry with decent enough flavor. It was missing something though but I can't figure it out. It was very easy to prepare, stuck it in a crock for 5 hours and made some rice. Although it was basically a decent dish and better than the first dish it was still not real exciting to me.

Sunday we backed up a lasagna. I wasn't expecting much because the other dished didn't blow my socks off and rarely does a lasagne blow my socks off anyway. But the lasagna was as good as I expected and its a huge pan. Dishes like lasagna or king ranch come in casserole size and are 10 people servings instead of the usual 4 people servings you get from regular dishes.

Right now its looking like the use of Village Table will not be acceptable for me as a normal dining schedule. I still have a few more dishes to go but I am already trying to put a gameplan together so that I can get back into the kitchen.

Beef Stew is are next dish.

[Alinka]

jscarbor,

Thank you for taking the time to give us a detailed report of your experience with Village Table. I've peeked inside their kitchen, and the whole idea seemed interesting, but I was wondering how good their food is. It was interesting to see your opinion.

Right now, to avoid cooking every day, I try to freeze individual-sized entrees that I take to work to eat for lunch. Healthy, organic, and (I think) delicious . So I'm sort of my own personal chef .

[jscarbor]

Beef stew turned out to be pretty bad. I think one of the problems with this kind of concept is you can't build flavors like you can with a from scratch meal.

Had a pork tenderloin dish that might have been the easiest of all the dishes to make if you did so from scratch so it is kind of a waste to pay someone else for an avg recipe. That being said it wazs the best of any of the dishes to date.

We had chicken cordon bleu also and it wasn't bad.

[jscarbor]

I think what I am going to try and do is come up with a few dishes that I can prepare ahead of time and freeze as Alinka says she does. I'll just come up with some fairly easy tasty dishes for those days that you need them then wait for a rainy weekend and start preparing.

I can make and freeze chili blanco.

Make a chicken stock for soups/stews/sauces.

Pork tenderloin dish. maybe with an asian theme so that I can then back it up with fried rice dish the next day.

A good casserole dish that you can put together raw and freeze? Can you do that with king ranch?

I figure i can come up with something else.