Susan Bonser, a Fresh Taste Meals customer, mixes ingredients for meatloaf with kalbi sauce. Elena Olmstead photos

By ELENA OLMSTEAD

Nearly everyone has experienced that feeling of dread when you walk through the door after a long day’s work and realize there is still one more chore waiting for you – making dinner.

But making dinner doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, making dinner can be as simple as coming home, turning on the oven and popping in a meal you made yourself.

The owners of Yakima’s Fresh Taste Meals are making a living making people’s lives easier.

Debbie Boorman, chef and kitchen manager, creates a monthly menu that includes everything from balsamic marinated pork roast with lemon honey sauce to French dip sandwiches to turkey pot pie to Salisbury steak with red potatoes. Every month Fresh Taste Meals customers have 14 menu items to choose from.

Boorman said the storefront, located at 2204 W. Nob Hill Blvd. Suite I, is set up so that each menu item has a station that includes a recipe card that shows customers how to put the meals together. Then customers set about choosing the menu items they want to buy and putting them together in freezer-ready packages. Then they go home pop the meals in the freezer and when it’s time to cook dinner they just pull it out and put it directly in the oven. 

Fresh Taste Meals customers have to schedule a time to come in and put together their meals. Boorman said it typically takes people an hour to put together six meals or two hours to put together 12 meals. She said each meal is designed to serve four to six people and customers can split them up — paying for one meal but dividing that one portion into two, two serving meals.

Boorman said people who want to try some of Fresh Taste Meals’ food before signing up for a six or 12-meal session can come in a Wednesday. Boorman said on that day people can walk in and put together one six-serving meal. Another way to try their wares is to come during regular business hours and pick something out of the freezer. Boorman said they have meals, which are already put together, available for sale in the freezer at anytime.

Boorman said for those people who are too busy to come in and put together their own meals, Fresh Taste Meals offers a service where they’ll put the meals together for you. Then customers just have to walk in and pick them up. Boorman said they also offer several two-serving options every month, which are perfect for singles and seniors who don’t want to make a home-cooked meal every night.

“It just saves so much time and energy,” Boorman said.

Boorman said her customers run the gamut from working mothers to busy singles.

“We have something for everyone and everyone needs to eat,” Boorman said.

The cost of Fresh Taste Meals ranges from $9 for a two-serving meal to $22 for a six-serving meal. But buying more meals brings the price down, for example it’s $225 to put together 12 six-serving meals, which is $18.75 a meal.

Boorman works at Fresh Taste Meals with her mother and owner Julie Boorman, and her sister and business manager Patricia Koethke.

But buying prepared meals isn’t the only answer to making putting together dinner easier. With a little organization and a lot of freezer bags people can do it all themselves.

Chriss Radach, wife of 11 years and mother of two young boys, has been putting together her own dinners for years. 

Radach said the key to making life easier for yourself is planning ahead. She said she plans a weekly menu, two weeks at a time. Then she goes grocery shopping twice a month to buy everything she needs to make what she’s planned.

And whenever she has a chance she makes extra. She said if she’s making chicken strips for dinner, she will make extra and freeze them. Then those chicken strips can be pulled out anytime for lunches or for dinner over the weekend.

She said on occasion she has also been known to set aside a Saturday for cooking. She said she’ll plan on making several casseroles or other dishes that freeze well and spend the day making them in bulk. She said she plans ahead what she’s going to make and then buys everything she’ll need and extra foil pans to freeze them in. 

“We use them a lot over the weekends and when we have company,” Radach said.

She said having meals ready to pop in the oven can be a lifesaver, especially on those nights when there is homework, soccer practice and her husband is running late.

Something else that has helped make Radach’s life a little easier is she no longer refrigerates her leftovers. 

“I got tired of finding leftovers in the back of the fridge,” she said.

So now, she freezes all of her leftovers, even if it’s something she plans on having for lunch the next day.

“It’s just an extra minute or two in the microwave,” Radach said.

Radach said what keeps her motivated to stay on top of her dinner planning are those weeks when she’s fallen off the planning wagon. She said those nights when it hits her that she needs to make dinner and finds she has nothing in the house, make her appreciate how nice it is to have a casserole stashed away in the freezer.