scratchDC coming to Arlington

This blog focuses more on dining out in restaurants and bars in the area, but it never hurts to mix things up by cooking a meal for two at home. Did you ever want to cook dinner for a date, but you have no clue what to make or have little experience cooking?

A new food delivery service called scratchDC is expanding soon just opened in Arlington and Alexandria. They currently deliver ready to cook ingredients and instructions to certain parts of DC. When you order their service, they will hand deliver that box's meal (they offer one different meal each day) to your home or work.

scratchDC graciously let me the be the first in Clarendon to try their service, and set up a promo code of "clarendonnights" for 15% off first orders for my readers. I thought this would be a fun exercise since I have zero cooking talent and experience. The closest thing I get to being a chef is putting a frozen meal from Trader Joes into the oven.

I chose to make the creamy garlic parm fettucini with lemon grilled chicken meal. The ingredients arrived right on time (they have great communication with their customers) in a fun little twine tied box:

All incredients are included, cut and measured for you. The photo below shows all the contents for this dish, including raw chicken cutlets, mushrooms, sauce, garlic, butter, flour and everything else needed. There also two chocalate chip cookie dough balls for desert.

Since everything is already measured and chopped for you, cooking it is much easier for a novice like me. They estimated it would take 30 minutes to complete this meal, but it took me 45. This receipe required 3 different sized pots/pans, a pasta strainer and a range:

The marinated chicken pasta turned out great, with the mushrooms adding some great flavor. The meal got great reviews, and the cookies were a nice little bonus.

This meal would have cost $26 and made about 3 servings, enough for dinner for 2 plus leftovers. This is great if you want to cook an impressive meal but have no time to get ingredients from the store. Remember to use my promo code of clarendonnights to get 15% off your first order!