PlateJoy #1: Sautéed mushroom scrambled eggs

I recently discovered a startup called PlateJoy that offers meal delivery (but the meals are not cooked — they provide ingredients and recipes). Technically, the ingredients (in my case) were delivered by Instacart. That went flawlessly: somehow the deliveryman even managed to get inside my apartment complex (“The door was still open,” he said) and meet me right at my door. Great!

Overall, it appears to be an overwhelming amount of food, but I think that’s entirely my fault. I think I ordered 3 meals for each of breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and each meal can be eaten twice, so I think it’s a total of 3 * 3 * 2 = 18 meals (enough food food for about a week). I may be wrong here, but this is what I remember ordering.

Instacart packed the ingredients incredibly well. About 57X better than if I’d tried to pack them myself.

At first, I didn’t realize that the guy was from Instacart and they’re a separate company from PlateJoy. I asked the Instacart guy for instructions, e.g. what to cook, when, and how. He said, “Oh, no instructions, just leave your feedback online.” Later I checked my email and found that PlateJoy had emailed me the recipes.

I read from the TechCrunch review that PlateJoy used to provide printed recipes (on paper?) but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. I actually would really like that, because while cooking, it’s a pain to keep my computer screen on (the power saver keeps turning it off) and my keep washing my hands (I’m a clean freak when it comes to my computer: I never touch the keyboard with anything less than perfectly-clean hands). So paper recipes would have been great. I might have to figure out some way to print them myself, but I don’t have a printer :(

The first meal I decided to make is “Sautéed mushroom scrambled eggs”. I followed their proprietary recipe fairly closely, except that I left out paprika (I don’t think I have any) and didn’t bother with the toasted gluten-free bread.

I’m not actually a big fan of bread, but the real reason is that I’m getting over a cold, and I have a sore throat. So I didn’t want toast today. Maybe I’ll try it next time.

One ingredient was parsley. For some reason, I got an absurdly huge amount of this green plant. It has a very strong smell and taste, so it wasn’t really necessary for me to use much:

Holy moly that is a lot of parsley. I want to share with neighbors!

Here I got everything onto the pan:

I also added some chopped scallions, which you can see on top there. I don’t think the recipe called for it, but I had some scallions that I had purchased myself, so I threw them in.

I think I left the eggs on for too long, or the heat was too high, because when I started flipping, I noticed that some parts looked burned:

But it ended up looking pretty much fine:

And it tasted quite excellent, too.

I really like PlateJoy’s format of simple and concise recipes. This is incredibly important. I don’t have time to read a long or complex recipe.

I have some problems, though they aren’t PlateJoy’s fault per se:

1. My kitchen is messy. I want a clean and organized kitchen, but I don’t know how to do it.

2. I have a lot of food I don’t eat. I have a bunch of english muffins that I got long ago, but I don’t want them. I don’t think I’ll eat them because I’m trying to be gluten free. I don’t know for certain if I’m gluten intolerant, but I do think I feel better when not eating gluten.

3. PlateJoy delivered me a bunch of ginger. I hate ginger. I don’t know what recipe it goes with, but I don’t think I’ll add ginger to it. Should the ginger be refrigerated?

4. The amount of food I ordered was absurd. This was entirely my fault, but I did tell PlateJoy that I’m just one person, so they should do the thinking for me, right? Maybe I will eat all the food — it’s too early to say. We’ll see!