A friend of mine once told me that she couldn’t wait to be admitted to a nursing home because they have people who do everything for you: Tell you when to get up. Tell you when to go to bed. Tell you when to take your pills. Feed you. Bathe you. Wipe your ass. Entertain you. Having myself worked in a nursing home, I fully disagree. I would argue that such lack of independence is detrimental to one’s dignity. However, when Ren found a website called Cookingforyou.ca, I was more than willing to relinquish independence and let someone else do the work for me. (matt)
It's a well known fact that Matty lived at home during university. As everyone is aware, these are the key years for learning how to live independently and to teach yourself how and when to get up, go to bed, take your pills, eat, bathe, etc. Unfortunately, due to Matty's living situation during college, he did not even start to explore these skill-sets until he was 22. This has left him at times very confused and his development very stunted. You know how uncomfortable you feel when you're in a public washroom and some random 4-year old kid comes out of a cubicle and asks you to wipe his ass for him because he doesn't really know how, yet his parents have sent him into the world (of public restrooms) alone? Now imagine if that kid is 30 years old, and has been eating vindaloo. (ren)
The idea behind Cookingforyou.ca is that you can have pre-made meals delivered to your house, which can be thrown in the microwave and served as if they were prepared by yourself. It’s ideal if you are bedridden or lazy like us. That being said, if you are bedridden, be warned to stock up appropriately as they only deliver to certain areas of the city depending on what day of the week it is. In other words, if it’s Monday and you are a cancer patient living in Spruce Cliff (wherever that is), don’t count on your delivery for another 3 days. Hope you have lots of Lean Cuisine, Mr. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. (Offside.) (matt)
While cancer is never funny, the idea of actually relying on cookingforyou.ca to properly nourish a human being is down-right hilarious. I think the guy with the “Monkey Chow Diary” had a much better idea. (ren)
When we looked at the menu, we counted at least 4 curries. While we both agreed to preface this review with the caveat that Cookingforyou.ca is not an Indian restaurant nor is it an Indian focused business, we thought our readers might enjoy a different type of review. In the future, we will likely review curry-centric items you can buy at your local Safeway. We won’t even discuss the dress code. (matt)
I might still discuss the dress code. This is all from memory of course, but back when I worked there, it was to my immense amusement that I discovered some discrepancies to “the code” On the store-wide dress code you were allowed to wear black, brown or navy pants, however the pharmacy-specific one did not allow navy, but did allow green. No matter how I twisted it around in my head I could not figure out what made green appropriate for pharmacy staff, but not the rest of the store. Did they keep getting mistaken for produce? It would be quite annoying to be a Safeway manager and find your produce guy having a nap, upside down in the lettuce with only his green pants-ed legs sticking out; the perfect disguise. And what was wrong with pharmacists wearing blue? I just don't get it. When I was there I mostly dressed in drag, since they made no mention of gender-specific requirements and I thought a nice flowery skirt would look better than boring old black pants anyway. (ren)
I live in Palliser, meaning I needed to order for Wednesday. I didn’t really need to ask Ren what he wanted. I knew he would go with Butter Chicken. I chose the Kashmiri Lamb dish. I felt ridiculous ordering 2 servings of Rice for $6.75 but did anyways just for kicks. I could have made rice at home but thought that if I was gonna relinquish independence, I might as well have the same experience as my nursing home patients. Day 5 of bowel protocol: Fleet enema. (matt)
It is not a given that I will go with butter chicken, but given the choices that was definitely the safe bet. When there are other dishes on the menu that intrigue me, or if I have a feeling that the butter chicken will disappoint I tend to steer clear. However, the only thing that caught my eye on the menu more than the butter chicken was the “Whole savoury roasted turkey” for $150. However this not being a very traditional indian dish, and me not having 18 other friends to share it with, I decided to go with the old stand-by. (ren)
One day before my date with Ren, I placed a phone call to Cookingforyou.ca to order. I was told that they would have to phone me back after the owner/manager had okay’d the order for delivery. What was this about? I wondered if they were scoping out my address to see if it actually existed. I thought about the time my friend secretly ordered a pizza to be delivered to Andreas Garvic’s house and then watched from behind some bushes as hilarity & confusion occurred between Garvic & the pizza delivery boy. (matt)
They phoned me back a few hours later. I was told that they are not able to deliver for orders under $50. While I later confirmed on their website that this is the policy, it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I would have to order 2 other curries. In this case, Potato and Spinach Dhal and Chicken & Yoghurt curry which is Very High in Fiber according to the website. I applaud them for including the nutritional information. A nice touch. (matt)
They also mention that the potato and spinach dhal is low in cholesterol, which is always nice considering my awesome lipid panel. Of course this was balanced out by the butter chicken which is notoriously high in cholesterol. We sold an awful lot of lipitor up in castleridge. They've actually included nutritional info for nearly every dish, which would be nice if I cared about that sort of thing. My bag of Doritos also has nutritional info on the back. (ren)
At this point I was informed that delivery would be between 1-3PM, when I was at work but that they could charge me a deposit of 5 dollars for a refrigeration container, to be left on my porch. If I didn’t want to drive to the Foothills Industrial Park to return the container, the staff member suggested, I “could recycle it”. Hmm… Environmentally friendly AND business savy?!? Think again. Recycling Styrofoam can be difficult, cost prohibitive and is not listed on the City of Calgary’s website of recyclable material. (matt)
We could have “recycled” it like we did on the Calgary Flames bus trip back in our college days, by tearing it into the littlest pieces that we could and scattering them around the bus. This angered the bus driver so much that we got to ride all the way back to saskatoon without heat. Alternately we could have labeled it up as an “organ in transit” box and left it sitting around in odd places, filming the results in a Candid Camera type manner. This plan would need us to actually purchase a video camera, so it was quickly nixed. (ren)
I was asked to make a cheque payable to Wife Inc. and leave it in the mailbox. If you actually have a wife, it’s important to let your spouse know that Wife Incorporated is not some type of Russian mail- order bride service or dirty latin maid service, but rather, the parent company of Cookingforyou.ca. Otherwise, there could be some awkward personal banking discussions in your household. (matt)
Not unlike “Hire a Husband”, the general contracting company around town here. Of course if your wife is routinely having to hire a surrogate husband for the basic yard-work duties it might be time to pay her a little more attention before she finds a surrogate husband for her other needs. (ren)
The next day I rushed home from work to find a massive Styrofoam “eskie” on my front porch. I couldn’t believe the size of it. I think my neighbours suspected I was importing massive supplies of refrigerated Anthrax and Smallpox Vaccines. It was a serious case of over packaging. On top of the foam crate was the invoice for $65. Ouch. To add insult to injury, part of the invoice had a section labeled Percent Discount. Under this header, someone had handwritten “0%”. It was like they looked at the invoice, saw my name and said, “we’re not even gonna leave this area blank. We want him to know he’s worth ZERO. Let’s write it in so he knows.” Cookingforyou.ca was losing points and we hadn’t even started nuking the curry. (matt)
The cooking for you webpage recommends letting their dishes thaw overnight before cooking, however, being men we had no time to wait for this. We wanted to eat the same day as delivery and nothing was going to stop us. Of course we were then pleased to find that the packaging had defrosting instructions right on them..... game on! (ren)
Ren arrived and we opened beers. Each food package had nutritional information and easy to follow instructions: Defrost x 12-14 mins then heat x 2-3 mins. Unfortuanately, the engineering team who designed my microwave decided that if you are going to defrost something it must be either POULTRY, MEAT or FISH and you must know the weight of the substance in pounds. There is no generic DEFROST button. While I was able to figure out the weight of each dish based on the labeling and higher math (read: multiplication), the task of defrosting the lentils dish caused some frustration. Next time I buy a microwave it’s gonna have a “Legumes” button. (matt)
This of course is still better than my microwave which is so insanely overpowered that I generally have to divide cooking times for most products by ½ in order to not completely chernobyl them. One would think that buying a more powerful “Radiation King” is automatically a good thing, however it is very hard to cook a cup-a-noodles when the water completely boils out in the first 30 seconds leaving the noodles simmering in a melting plastic cup of doom. (ren)
Nonetheless, we figured things out and sat down to watch Kenny vs Spenny while we ate. The best part of our meals were (in order):
1) Heineken,
2) 7 dollars worth of Steamed Rice,
3) Kashmiri Lamb,
4) nothing else.
If we had to recommend something to order, it would be the Lamb dish, which actually had some flavour. On its own it might have scored a 6 or 7. Unfortuanately, the rest of the dishes didn’t really hold up. The Butter chicken, Chicken and yoghurt curry and Dhal, all lacked in spice. Ren remarked that he was uncertain whether we were actually eating curry. I later saw him digging through my kitchen garbage to forensically exam the packaging and labels for evidence of curry. When he brought out the “CSI black light” and mysteriously started inspecting my mattress, I had to put my foot down and throw him out of my house.(matt)
In place of actually writing about the food, I will post an MSN conversation I had with a friend after I returned home:
Curry Ren says (9:15 PM):
yeah....tasted like they froze it a year ago....
you know how potatoes taste if you freeze them then thaw em and eat em
Diana says (9:16 PM): ick...ur right...no good at all...freezerburn is bunk
Curry Ren says (9:17 PM):
and all 4 dishes tasted like that
and it cost $65
ick
the only thing i would have eaten in a restaurant was the curried lamb....and that would only be in a pub....after 3 newcastles....and before 2 more
Diana says (9:18 PM): blammo! that is totally balls!
Curry Ren says (9:19 PM):
and it even just had that kinda generic "we threw some safeway curry powder in the pot so now its lamb curry" vibe.....not particularly great
Diana says (9:20 PM): that is unfortunate indeed..hopefully you can redeem yourself and your hunger sometime soon
Curry Ren says (9:21 PM):
yeah.....you might not have to read the review for this one.....it seems to be writing itself during this conversation
That's enough of a review for me. Maybe I should have gone with the whole turkey. (ren)
In fairness to Cookingforyou.ca, they do have a money back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the food. While I considered taking them up on this offer, I didn’t think it would be ethically or journalistically responsible as a food critic to do so. I will concede that the Lamb Kashmiri is a decent dish and that Cookingforyou.ca isn’t a curry restaurant and as such, probably shouldn’t be held to the same standards as say, Punjabi Sweethouse. However, if you’re an avid reader of this website, you know we don’t mince words about curry. We are brutally honest and sometimes painfully harsh. I’m giving Cookingforyou.ca a zero percent discount when it comes to scoring the experience.
Score: 3/10
[Apparently matty is so upset he forgot to list 3 people who were not at his house...... (ren)]
