Recipes <\/p>\n
The first meal<\/span> I ever cooked for myself was ramen. The next 12 were all, also, ramen. So were a sizable percentage of the next hundred. By age 11, as a latchkey kid, I had mastered the art of the Maruchan egg drop, the sliced green onion, the chili and soy sauce and mushroom additions. I learned, early, my love of cumin and coriander. Any ingredient, actually, seemed fair game.<\/p>\n And so when I say I still felt a little swell of pride last month after composing a handsome ramen bowl from a HelloFresh delivery meal kit<\/a>, I speak as a man of great experience.<\/p>\n Photograph: Matthew Korfhage<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n I kid somewhat, but it’s true: Packaged home ramen has long been the food of the weary, not the proud. And this was a rainy Tuesday, after hours at work. But by the time I got done drizzling chili oil over a pork-chicken shoyu ramen bowl topped with a lightly seared breast of sesame-grilled chicken, heavy laden also with freshly saut\u00e9ed mushroom and wilted spinach, I felt like I’d accomplished something noteworthy. Not only did dinner look delicious, I did a thing.<\/em> On a Tuesday. Without trying too hard.<\/p>\n This is the promise of meal kits like HelloFresh\u2014the reason people pay more than groceries, but less than any decent delivered meal, to receive them. It is the promise of a better, but still manageable vision of domesticity\u2014one that involves you making a well-conceived meal without actually doing the work of, well, conceiving it.<\/p>\n Photograph: Matthew Korfhage<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\nRecipes Light, Bright, Maybe Even Cosmopolitan<\/h2>\n