Grace’s Kitchen
2821-C NW Market St, 297-3663
Mon-Fri 11 am-7 pm, Sat 10 am-5 pm.
I was a little sad to learn there’s no Grace. She’s not even an imaginary character like Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima. There is no Grace, but her kitchen is a year-old business that hopes to slide into the niche between homemade food and mass-marketed frozen dinners like Hungry Man and Lean Cuisine. So for less than 20 dollars you can pop into the Ballard GK headquarters, or about a dozen markets around the area, and take home a box of frozen, vacuum-sealed pouches with everything you need for a dinner for two (even garnishes and a wine recommendation!).
There’s something about Grace’s Kitchen that smacks of an MBA thesis–the slick website, the high-pressure sales pitch when you buy meals at the flagship store, the mini-mission statements that cover each meal’s carton (“We’re about reclaiming time for you and yours, so you can slow things down a bit”). It turns out the year-old operation is even run by a former Cinnabon CEO.
Even though it is kind of corporate, GK gets many things right: Their meals are for the most part made of organic vegetables, sustainably harvested fish, and naturally raised beef. What’s more, they keep different elements of the meal separate until cooking time. Proteins like fish and meat are generally better frozen before they’re cooked than if they’re frozen afterwards. But that does mean GK meals aren’t brainless microwave affairs. You’ve got to thaw most items overnight in the refrigerator, then pan-fry, bake, or reheat each element, often separately.
When a pork piccata dinner ($16.99) came with pork cutlets from high-end meat wholesaler Nicky USA, I was impressed. They were blushing and juicy after I sautéed them–certainly much better quality than the pork in my typical takeout, burritos, or banh mi. Too bad that the lemon-caper sauce that went on the cutlets had a tinny taste, and the accompanying baby carrots were comically stringy–all Andrew and I could do was suck on them, hoping to pry some carroty pap from their fibers.
For more sustenance, I went back for seconds on some ugly black-eyed pea cakes and decided that GK should market the spicy patties by the dozen (take that Gardenburger!), without the dismal cafeteria-flavored corn chowder ($11.99) that they were designed to offset. The halibut ($19.99) had a harder time transitioning from the icy freezer to the sauté pan, partially because GK provided the filets with an ill-advised almond crust that wanted to burn long before the fish inside was cooked. (If I tried it again, I’d start the fish on the stovetop and finish it in the oven.) Minty pea-potato purée and leek sauce did their best to liven up the not quite tender fish.
I was pretty excited about the ready-to-bake peach upside-down cake ($5.99) I picked up along with my meals. When it came out of the oven it was steamy and inviting, but even though there were no particularly weird ingredients listed on the carton, the cake tasted like nothing homemade. This, to varying degrees, is true of everything we sampled. Andrew’s assessment at the end of the meal was pretty much dead on: “really good airplane food.”
Despite such half-praise, GK meals are certainly a lot better than most of the crap I eat in the name of a quick meal, but the real question with Grace’s boils down to how convenient do you need your convenient food to be? Given my current pregnant state, I don’t have much time between a passing thought of dinner and total emotional and physical breakdown brought on by hunger. By the time I have three pans out, and I’m sautéing and heating, I might as well be cooking a better meal from scratch. Andrew, who finds dinner shopping and prep onerous, was more impressed with the concept and the tidy, ready to cook portions, as neatly bagged up as the elementary school lunches his mom prepared for him. If you’re the type who can remember to pull the dinner from the freezer in order to have an easy, “spontaneous” dinner the following night, then Grace’s Kitchen might be the solution for you. If you’re more like me, you might be more drawn to Trader Joe’s, which sells my current top desperation dinner–Neiman Ranch’s fancy (and delicious) hot dogs. One pan, three minutes, and you’re eating!