It's 5pm. Tired of wondering, "What's For Dinner?" |
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New Innovative Dinner Solution For Desperate Housewives/Househusbands
Make 12 Homemade Family Dinner Entrées in Less Than 2 Hours!
By Rebecca Crowley
San Diego's First Dream Dinners Dishes Up Fun, Convenience in a Specialty Kitchen
Steve Hall understands the plight of moms who struggle to put a good meal on the table every day. The San Diego native, father of 5-year-old twin daughters and an 11-year-old son, has been "Mr. Mom" for the past three years, juggling full-time parenting with part-time freelance work.
Meanwhile, Hall's wife, Charlotte Starck, balances a full-time career and family responsibilities. "My colleagues and I who have children struggle to balance work and motherhood, trying to be good at both simultaneously," she explains.
Like most busy parents, Steve and Charlotte have good intentions when it comes to thinking about cooking healthy dinners at home. But dinner prep gets shoved to the back burner on days when there's too much to do. When the couple discovered an easy, fun solution that puts a variety of tasty, healthy dinners on the table for about $3.31 a serving, they were instantly hooked.
Sound like a dream come true? It is. It's called Dream Dinners, an innovative concept in meal preparation that eliminates the drudgery of daily menu planning, shopping, prep-work and cleanup by moving the dinner assembly process out of home kitchens and into specially equipped retail outlets.
Here's how it works:
Customers preview a monthly menu online at dreamdinners.com and select 12 dinners from a menu featuring entrées such as Herb-Crusted Flank Steak, Four-Cheese and Meatball Calzones and Citrus Ginger Salmon. Then they register to attend a meal assembly session at a Dream Dinners retail location. At the store, customers rotate among refrigerated recipe stations, scooping freshly cut and prepped uncooked ingredients into the provided baking pans or zip-top freezer bags. They take the uncooked dinners home and place them in the freezer. The whole process takes about two hours and costs about $239. The result: 12 healthy, homemade dinners - containing an average of six servings - that anyone can quickly remove from the freezer, thaw, and pop into the oven.
"The more we researched it, the more it hit home," says Hall. "It was family; it was community." He and Charlotte decided to open a Dream Dinners franchise, the first in the San Diego area. "Dream Dinners is the tool that helps you to feel like you can serve something you're proud of instead of takeout or frozen meals," he explains.
The food isn't casserole-heavy or T.V. dinner flat, either, adds Hall. Each month's menu offers at least one meatless dish, a variety of low-carb options, a brunch item and a hearty appetizer. Dream Dinners is what you might call "everyday gourmet" - high-quality food that's ideal for weeknight meals, camping trips, or entertaining.
Hall notes that Dream Dinners is perfect for singles, couples and small families. "Our dinners can be split in half, so that customers can take home 24 smaller dinners," he says.
Hall and Starck bring years of business experience to the table. Hall helped create a local cooking show that has evolved into the Central Valley Cooking Show. "I've always loved to cook and I enjoyed the preparations for the show and making it fun and interesting to watch. Now I actually get to do it myself."
Hall will be running the nuts and bolts of the store while Starck, an award-winning weekend news anchor and reporter for KUSI -TV, will be getting the word out to busy moms in the community that "help is here."
Dream Dinners, touted in Oprah's O magazine as one of the top five "solid-gold ways to save money," has 109 stores in 25 states. Dream Dinners is the brainchild of Stephanie Allen, 41, a former caterer from the Seattle area who's been preparing freezer meals for her family for years. In March, 2002, Allen bowed to pressure from friends and agreed to teach them how to assemble freezer dinners. She invited 12 friends to join her for a "girls' night out" at a rented commercial kitchen. Those friends invited all their friends, and Allen ended up teaching 44 people her techniques. A new business was born.
Allen and her business partner, Tina Kuna, 42, opened two Seattle-area locations in quick succession - stores that now draw hundreds of customers per month. Allen attributes the intense interest in Dream Dinners to the fact that "we all have to eat, and most of us would choose to eat at home, if possible." Unfortunately, she adds, "there are only so many hours in a day, and we can't do everything." For overscheduled American families, nightly meal planning and preparation is a burden they'd rather not carry. That's where Dream Dinners comes in, explains Allen. "We help take the edge off during dinnertime so people can get out of the kitchen and enjoy their families."
Dream Dinners' easy-to-prepare recipes allow customers to try new and interesting foods. "Our customers hand-select and assemble meals, modifying recipes to suit their family's tastes, and then serve them on the evenings that are best-suited to their schedules," says Tina Kuna.
Customers enjoy the kitchen camaraderie, as well. A typical dinner assembly session includes working parents, empty nesters, college students, single dads and couples who sneak out for a "date night." Allen likens the experience to "twelve people coming into your living room. You visit and cook and do a little project; then everyone goes home." Now when those new friends return home, they're sitting down to eat with their families.
Helping families rediscover the traditional dinner hour is a thrill, agree Kuna and Allen.
"There's nothing more gratifying than seeing entire communities connecting around the dinner table at least three nights a week," says Allen.
Hall and Starck intend to make sure that happens in San Diego . "I'm a San Diego boy; and we want to raise our children here," says Hall. "We hope to have many opportunities to touch our community, starting with our celebrity Dinner-A-Thon on August 16 to benefit the Ronald McDonald House where families really appreciate home cooking. We plan on packing their freezer with homemade dinners."
Dream Dinners At-A-Glance
- Customers order any combination of 12 individually-priced dinners from a 14-entrée monthly menu.
- Quick 6 Dinner Fix T sessions allow customers to assemble six dinners in one hour or less.
- Each dinner serves four-to-six people.
- The cost for 12 dinners averages $239 translating into approximately $3.31 per serving and three, hassle-free meals a week for a month.
- Menus change monthly, with most-requested items reappearing periodically.
- In addition to meat main dishes, menus often feature hearty hors d'oeuvres, a brunch casserole, a soup, a meatless entrée and a dessert.
- All recipes can be tailored to a family's specific tastes or to accommodate dietary needs or food sensitivities.
- Entrées incorporate lowfat and nonfat ingredients, and many low-carb selections are offered.
- Nutritional information for every menu item is provided at www.dreamdinners.com
- A national food distributor handles all food orders so that San Diego customers receive the same consistent quality as customers in Seattle .
- Ingredients for each entrée are freshly chopped, prepped and waiting at refrigerated work stations.
- Staff cleans up after customers so customers can concentrate on meal assembly.
- Disposable baking dishes, aluminum foil, cellophane wrap and zip-top bags are included in the meal price. Customers may also bring their own baking dishes.
- Dream Dinners franchises are currently in 109 cities in 25 states; the company plans to open a total of 150 stores by the end of 2005.
