“This is a real Midwestern meal,” my father said, digging into a plate I’d prepared from the Martha Stewart–endorsed Dinnerly meal kit. “Meat. Potatoes. Green beans.”
This, for my father, was high praise. It was the type of meal he’d grown up with as a child in Nebraska: hearty, no-nonsense, balanced, always something green, and always a slab of meat. For a week on a visit while my mother spent time with the grandkids, I cooked him dinners with Dinnerly, the lower-cost cousin of the truly excellent, cheffy Marley Spoon meal kit also endorsed by Stewart (and also by me: 8/10, WIRED Recommends). The biggest surprise for him was how much some of these meals intersected with old-school American home scratch cooking.
The “Greek Lemon-Oregano Chicken” we were eating did indeed involve a bit of citrus, but this character was less notable than the salty savoriness of deglazed…
