I know not everyone has access to Fresh Direct, but I wish you did. Fresh Direct is not only genius because it is so convenient. It is not simply that you can search foodtv.com or epicurious.com, pick a recipe, switch active windows to the Fresh Direct website, and order exactly what you want/need. And it is not only that they are very fairly, and often better, priced when compared to their competition (competition that eats hours of your day as you walk around tombs of fluorescent light, gathering the products you will lug back from the place). It is their responsiveness to customer requests.
Fresh Direct's webpage set-up is simple. It is divided into grocery sections, meat, deli, heat n eat, and so on. There is also a search tool, so you can enter things like "horseradish root" or "spicy pickled beans" (I put them both in Bloody Marys). If you search the virtual aisles and don't find what you are looking for, you simply send an email and, in my experience, they work to start offering the requested product.
De Cecco whole-wheat pasta is what we like to cook when we are using hard spaghetti (cook it exactly 2 minutes less then the package advises and you will get a great al dente noodle with a subtle nuttiness). When we first started ordering Fresh Direct, they carried 2 shapes, fusilli and linguine. Around our third order, Wife sent an email asking them to bolster their whole wheat pasta offerings and they immediately added spaghetti and De Boles penne. That's service.
Kefir was another story. Kefir is a drinkable low fat milk culture, like yogurt, that people from former Soviet countries swear will keep you young and free from disease, well into your two hundredth year. Really, it is a tasty and tangy way to get lower fat calcium into your diet without committing to the horrible low fat milk offerings that exist out there today (FDA-bashing, raw milk plug here). It took four whole weeks and two emails for them to find it and start carrying an organic variety that now just shows up to our house once a week. Try getting Food Emporium or Gristede's or even Whole Foods to do that.
The sections Wife and I do our most shopping on are Local Products and Organic Products. Obviously we prefer to keep our money as close to our community as possible, but honestly food just tastes better grown on or near the soil I live on, and watered with the water I drink. Fresh Direct makes that very easy, being a local business supporting local farmers. When what we are after is not available locally (ah the glory of northeastern season change) we shop in the organic section. Fresh Direct has been constantly adding to the list of choices that are locally grown, and organic. The best part is if you click on broccoli there in front of you are both farm fresh and organic, and it is easy to see that for $.50 more you can have the better tasting organic version.
There is a caveat to having ready access to actually fresh food that hasn't been treated for shipping and shelf life: you need to use it rather quickly, within a week really. This gives rise to some of my favorite Sunday night meals. Figuring out how to bring the remains of the week's produce into one big meal for the 3-5 friends that usually drop by on Sunday, with enough left over for wife and her office to consume at lunch, keeps me sharp, makes room in the fridge for the next delivery, and best of all keeps better tasting food in our lives. As far as quality of life goes, I would say Fresh Direct was the best part of '05.
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