The Indishpensable Challenge: Chipotle Lime Chicken Breasts with Roasted Corn Salsa

I was invited by Sarah Loewen to participate in The Indishpensable Challenge a few weeks back, and I hadn’t had the chance to report on it until this week. While I’ve been attending a conference and doing a substantial amount of client work, teaching and working on my research, obviously I haven’t had much time to cook, which is why doing this came so handy.

From their invite:

If you’re not familiar with Indishpensable, it’s a unique service based in Kitsilano that allows people to pick up a package of pre chopped, marinated seasonal and local ingredients. Each package includes easy to follow instructions to make a home cooked meal on-par with fine dining.

Because there isn’t any other service quite like it in Vancouver at the moment, some people question whether it’s truly easier and less expensive to buy an Indish dinner rather than try to make a similar one themselves from scratch. Obviously, we have a bias, but we’d love to test our theory…

And that’s where you could come in. With your love and knowledge of food, we would like to invite you to take the “Indish Challenge”.

The challenge was as follows:

Part 1: I tried one of the Indishpensable meals [this was complimentary].

Part 2: Indishpensable provided me with the recipe, and invited me to go out to and purchase the ingredients and make the same meal myself (offering to reimburse the grocery costs).

The factors that I (as a blogger) could use to analyze the experience included – how you would rate the Indish meal, the process of cooking a meal with everything already prepped, versus, the potential hassle factor of shopping around for the ingredients to make the same recipe. What is the actual difference in cost?

For my meal, I chose chipotle lime chicken breasts with roasted corn salsa ($13 per serving), served with grilled flatbread and cumin sour cream. It’s a meal that “appears” easy to make from the outset, but there is no real guarantee that it will be, quite frankly. I started cooking my meal but my usual semi-ADHD tendency (e.g. paying some attention to cooking, while blogging AND watching Criminal Minds) made me really realize that I do like this idea (the Indishpensable meals).

The great thing I found about the Indishpensable method is that it allowed me to actually do what I like doing (e.g. multi-task). It was also SO much easier having everything pre-prepared. I’m not sure I want to finish with part 2, which is going and doing the grocery shopping, doing all the preparation and cooking and so on. But I do think that it’s not all that expensive considering the cost of my time. I probably wouldn’t do it every week, but I’d probably at least try it a couple of times a month if I wanted to invite a friend over for a gourmet dinner without the hassle and with the amount of time I would save. And with a schedule like mine, this is a great option to be able to impress someone with a nice meal (withouth them knowing that I didn’t actually go through the hassle).

I also liked the fact that Indishpensable delivered the package to my office at The Network Hub and that they use environmentally-friendly ingredients all the way. I had the chance to bring the little portable container from my office to my home and didn’t have to worry much. Overall, I can see myself using the Indishpensable meals-to-go service.

Disclosure: The meal I enjoyed in this Challenge was complimentary and provided by Indishpensable. I did not receive any payment for the review. In this case, since I haven’t fulfilled the second part of the challenge (and I’m really too busy to go ahead and do the grocery shopping and it’d be a bigger hassle) so no reimbursement has been made either (nor is it needed). In every review I make, as indicated in previous posts, I retain full editorial control. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me via my contact form

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