Resolution: Eat better.
Good to Go
Three ways to ensure you’ll always have
the ingredients for a home cooked meal.
By Mary Lou Baker
DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016
For most of us, a list of New Year’s resolutions almost always includes something food related. We may 
pledge to eat less or eat better. We may promise to shop more locally or get organized so we can prepare wholesome meals, rather than leaning on fast food or grab-and-go at the grocery store. Writer Mary Lou Baker looks at local services that can help you take charge of your menu and the quality of your food – while in some cases, supporting local businesses and farmers.
Howard County is ahead of the curve when it comes to helping its residents take the high road to healthier eating. Even so, many of us want to hop on but aren’t sure where or how to start. Putting healthy meals on the table, after all, requires planning. A bundle of recipes, a trip to the grocery store on the weekend. Maybe a Sunday afternoon spent prepping for the week. Why can’t we just snap our fingers and have someone else do this planning, shopping and prepping?
It turns out, your dream is someone else’s business model. The shopping services below offer a range of solutions, from sourcing a week’s worth of local meats and produce and offering a few recipe suggestions, to packaging up and delivering every ingredient you’ll need for a delectable dish, so your commute home from work isn’t consumed with a mental survey of your pantry and fridge wondering what on earth you can put together for dinner.
Become a Friend
Friends & Farms has a client base that seems to grow larger by the day – mainly due to the glowing word-of-mouth reviews. The service, headquartered in Columbia, distributes bountiful bags of produce, meats, fish, breads, dairy and other fresh foods to locations from Roland Park to Annapolis each week. Founders Tim Hosking and Phil Gotwalls are two guys with backgrounds that marry well in their entrepreneurial venture: Tim has worked in small business development while Phil is the “foodie,” with extensive experience with local farmers and a skill for logistics. They launched Friends & Farms in June 2012 with a warehouse in Columbia and today have 700 clients. The model is similar to a CSA (community supported agriculture), but instead of delivering goods from just one farm, Friends & Farms finds its goods throughout the mid-Atlantic. On any given week, the basket may include fresh fish from a sustainable seafood supplier in Jessup, breads from Ellicott City’s Breadery, meats from Wayne Nell & Sons, dairy from Trickling Farms and produce from farmers within driving distance of Columbia. The owners try to keep prices competitive with local supermarkets.
Mary Beth Dulin who holds down two jobs while raising two sons, ages 5 and 7, signed up three years ago after sampling a served food from Friends & Farms at a dinner gathering. “I was sold because of the flavor and freshness of everything,” Dulin says. The weekly food supply has simplified her life, improved her family’s diet and nurtured her love of cooking, she adds. Dulin appreciates the occasional “parties” hosted 
by Hosking and Gotwalls at the Friends & Farm warehouse in Columbia, where “they welcome feedback from their customers,” she says.
Kim Flyr says she trusts the Friends & Farms staff to “make good decisions about what they supply to their customers.” Each week, she says, “My family looks forward to delivery day – it’s like a weekly Christmas present.” Flyr says she often uses the recipe links on the Friends & Family website.
An introductory order for $25 we picked up last fall was a heavy, blue reusable bag overflowing with goodies: a dozen large brown eggs; a half-pound of smoke-cured bacon that cooked up crisp instead of disappearing in a pool of hot fat; a pair of thick, boneless and skinless chicken breasts; ugly carrots with sweet carrot flavor; two each of golden squash, green peppers and yellow apples along with four in-season tomatoes). friendsandfarms.com.
Join a Relay Team
University of Virginia alum Zach Buckner birthed Relay Foods in his Charlottesville living room eight years ago and today has 200 employees helping him provide healthy foods to five markets in the mid-Atlantic.
Howard County clients pick up their weekly orders at the Columbia Auto Care and Repair Shop on Mondays between 3 and 7 p.m., driving home with free-range eggs, milk in glass bottles, deli items, grass-fed beef and produce picked the day before. Home delivery ($12-$15) is an option.
Flexibility is the watch word of Relay Foods, which means orders may be placed by midnight before the desired delivery date and everything is guaranteed “fresh that day,” according to company spokesperson Cheryssa Jensen. Clients have a choice of shopping on the Relay Foods’ expansive and attractive website for individual items, where the selection is mind boggling and the process time consuming, or going with the company’s meal plans. relayfoods.com
Courtesy of Blue Apron
An example from Blue Apron’s Family Meal plan: crispy curried catfish with chana masala & brown rice.
Don the Apron
Blue Apron is a national online grocery story with free delivery to Howard County residents. Its selling points are attention to dietary preferences and recipe cards for 500-700 calorie recipes that take about a half hour to prepare. All recipes are the results of its culinary team and introduce home cooks to methods they might not ordinarily try – like chicken under a brick paired with zucchini corn salad, a Southern shrimp boil and mushroom veggie burgers.
Recipes accompany each week’s order ($69.02 for two, discounted to $52.44 for first-timers; $139 a week for a family of four). Orders come in refrigerated packages delivered to your home and clients connect with Blue Apron’s online site for ordering. The company was listed among “Inc” Magazine’s 10 Most Innovate Start-ups in 2014. blueapron.com
