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Bite Of Minnesota: Local Crate Meal Delivery

Have you heard of meal delivery services like Blue Apron and Plated? These are services that deliver a box of pre-portioned ingredients to make a meal or two (or more) each week. The box is delivered to your house with ice packs to keep everything cold and if you have simple ingredients like oil, salt and pepper on hand, there's no need to run to the grocery store for ingredients: Everything is in the box.

After recently trying the Hello Fresh meal delivery service (more on that another time), I was eager to give another service a try and came across a local service, Local Crate, on Kickstarter. I regularly browse Kickstarter for food-related projects to support and I especially love to support local campaigns, so of course I supported them right away. Local Crate got word of this and sent me two meals to try out. Who am I to say no?

Bite Of Minnesota Ham Wrapped Trout from Local Crate- Crystal Grobe
(credit: Crystal Grobe)

The first meal arrived with local Red Table Meat Co.'s Royal ham, Rushing Waters trout filets, fingerling potatoes, parsnips and a bunch of herbs. It even came with tiny bottles of white wine and apple cider for deglazing the pan. We made this for lunch and felt pretty fancy. We eat salmon often, but never thought of trying trout.

Bite Of Minnesota Steak and Potatoes from Local Crate - Crystal Grobe
(credit: Crystal Grobe)

The second meal had ingredients sourced from Prairie Hollow Farm in Elgin, Minn., and contained already-marinated sirloin steak, mushrooms, potatoes, onion, and more containers of herbs, blended wine sauce and heavy cream. I cooked this meal over the weekend, officially marking my first time pan-searing steak at home. Another notch on my belt (both figuratively and literally). This meal was supposed to make 2 servings but it easily made 4 right-sized servings, which made me happy.

Both meals came with easy to follow recipe cards and included fun facts and definitions of cooking terms, great for novice cooks. As for cooking time, it came together in under and hour, pretty typical for trying an unfamiliar recipe.

Local Crate recently partnered with Birchwood Café for a special breakfast box containing ingredients for their famous savory waffles, coffee and OJ. Like I need another reason to stay at home and cook! They are also partnering with local chefs for recipe creation, which is sure to result in a fun variety of styles and tastes when it comes to meal selection.

Interested in checking it out? The Local Crate Kickstarter ends Wednesday morning, so act fast if you want to get one of their wonderful rewards. Or, you can wait until they go live and buy a meal or two to explore on your own. Either way, you're bound to try something new.

 

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