Take Home Gourmet

Originally, the storefront that housed Take Home Gourmet was one of those prepare-​your-​own freezer meal places that got hugely popular in the early aughts. (Does anyone else think that the trend died out because going to a place and assembling a freezer /​oven ready meal takes just as much work as going to the grocery store and cooking it at home?)
Take Home Gourmet has it figured out, though. Their team of chefs prepares and assembles everything in house and packages it into recyclable aluminum tins making it easy for busy people to stop by the shop, pick up dinner and cook it (or freeze it for later).
On any given day, they’ve got about 25 items in stock. Since it’s impossible to predict what people will be craving, chef John Wilson tries to make sure that there’s a decent variety of entrees, sides and desserts in stock.
The prices wind up being about $ 5 per person for an entrée (which is less than you’d spend going out), and they offer monthly plans where you can pay in advance at the beginning of the month and pick up your meals whenever.
When I stopped by the shop, I was pleased that there weren’t too many casseroles on the menu. There’s usually one, but for the most part, the entrees are things you would find in a restaurant — lasagna, cajun chicken pasta, beef enchiladas, etc.
I tried the lasagna (one of their signatures), parmesan chicken, Italian spinach, mac’n’cheese and peanut butter pie. In the interest of authenticity, they were all prepared from their frozen state, and honestly, I couldn’t tell.
The food wasn’t mindblowingly unique, but it was solidly tasty in a family-​dinner kind of way. It’s tastes like home cooking that levelled up (in some cases — like the Italian spinach — a lot). Meaning, if you wanted to pass it off as your own, you probably could. After all, you may not have prepared it, but technically, you did cook it.