The Pandemic has truly changed the way we eat. Our little escapades to eat outside thrice a week had stopped me and Snigdha have been on the lookout for indulging our taste buds.
Being active food bloggers on the Delhi circles, it had become quite paramount for us to restore some form of sanity and enjoy a few flavours. It might have been easy to order food from countless delivery apps including Uber Eats and Zomato but we went ahead and did something completely mind-blowing. We decided to combine our love for eating out and cooking through food subscription boxes.
The popularity of Food Boxes
The concept of foodie subscription boxes has most probably been fuelled by the rise of Masterchef style shows. Everyone wants to cook Gourmet restaurant-style food with exotic, hard to find ingredients, presenting it in ways we haven’t tried before. But finding such ingredients during all seasons along with the mise-en-place required for them can be quite daunting. It can easily take a whole day to prepare and create a complex new dish, but these meal subscription boxes can easily help you bypass both of these problems, sourcing these difficult to find ingredients and also the recipes and techniques allowing you to create these dishes.
Both of us have been trying to create some really amazing dishes at home: Prawn Tempura, Lemon Butter Grilled Basa, a Hyderabadi style Biryani or even a good old Ramen. Ramen is a dish which is very typical of how a foodie subscription box works. With more than so different ingredients required to cook a Japanese ChaShu Pork Belly Ramen, it is quite impossible to make a good Ramen at home, only if you don’t have a spare Japanese grandmother at home. I have been planning to make a Ramen during the last lockdown but the lack of ingredients and also the slow cooking technique required was quite evident. First of all, sourcing good Pork Belly is quite difficult in my hometown. Next, the marination, the seasonings and the sauces are even more difficult to find. But with a gourmet food subscription box like the Ramen one I tried out from ITC Hotels, I was able to prepare my ChaShu Pork Belly Ramen on any day, at my home.
Eating out becomes easy with a food subscription box.
Prepping for a Ramen from a Foodie subscription box is quite easy to operate. Log onto ITC hotels website and order from their massive menu. Just pull out the Noodles and boil them, prep the tare and the stock, dip your noodles and finish off with the toppings. We are ready to dig into some of the best Ramen.
Once we were done with the first recipe, we were hooked on ordering the meal subscription boxes to replace our eating out. There was a steady stream of ordering these boxes: Chicken Tikka, Grilled Salmon, Thai Green curry and everything in between. We were sitting at home and enjoying food from all over the world. Although our interest in Foodie subscription Boxes obviously soared during the pandemic, this isn’t the first time we were trying these out.
This concept had begun sprouting up around the world about a decade ago, although it has taken some time for it to come to India. We tried out these boxes when we travelled to US & Canada before the pandemic struck. We absolutely fell in love with the food that Vancouver offered us. Being a port city, it offers an unique and eclectic mix of food from all over the world. Be it the traditional French or British cuisine, the quintessential Indian and even South East Asian food be it Chinese, Vietnamese or Japanese.
Why Canada is one of my favourite places to eat?
The city of Vancouver has quite a few interesting places to eat. One of the first ones is the Starbucks at the Waterfront station. One of the first railway stations to connect the Western part of Canada with the Eastern one, the upper part of the walls and ceilings are done up with beautiful murals. It is here that the first Starbucks was opened outside of the United States. Although the coffee tastes pretty regular, it is the slice of history that makes for some happy sipping. Just as you walk outside the gilded gates, the Steam Works Brewing Company comes into view. One of the earliest harbingers of the bustling craft beer revolution in the city it is a throwback to the golden timber age of Vancouver, as beams constructed out of Douglas fir trees hold the ceiling up. One of their famous beers, the Winter Lager is brewed with the help of steam pipes snaking under the city and it still remains one of the few breweries to do so.
All thanks to its diverse nature, we decided to peak into a Lebanese restaurant Nuba for some good measure. A Lebanese platter worth remembering, we finished off the Labneh, Hummus and Falafel with some Pita Bread for good measure. Another one of our favourite joints was the Salt Tasting Room. An award-winning instrument with a focus on food and wine flights, all sourced from the local British Columbia area. We tried out the Canada Plate which featured a local Chevre Cheese along with honey from the Similkameen Valley, a slice of Speck (Cured Pork leg) with Guinness Mustard and a St. Pauline Cheese with pickled vegetables. The wine flights included three local wines. The red being the Skaha Vineyards Cabernet Franc ’14, a Reisling ’15 from Tantalus Estate Vineyard in the Okanagan Valley and a white from Pentage Winery which was a combination of Roussanne, Marsanne and Viognier ’11.
Another restaurant that showcases the best of British Columbia’s produce is ARC Dining at the Fairmont Vancouver. For breakfast, it was a Smoked Salmon Bagel and an Eggs Benedict topped with wild foraged mushrooms. For dinner, we tried out a Steak served with a red wine jus and cannot puree along with potato fondant, baby beets, granola and some carrots.
Well, if all this delicious food has gotten your taste buds tingling, then order yourself some Canadian food box subscription to keep the festive cheer going.
