I’m busy. All my friends know this, and you dear readers have probably noticed that yours truly, has been sorely missing from the blogosphere lately. I’ve been hard at work at my actual day job, and behind the scenes here, and all this hard work adds up and leaves little time for actually cooking. If I can’t even blog, how in the world am I going to cook?

Enter: Eat & Smile Foods, the locovore foodie’s answer to “no time to cook”. Chef Oliver Friendly visits all your favorite farmer’s market stands and then hand-makes pastas, breads, and whips up local ingredients into instant-prep dinner.Chef Friendly prepares balanced meals (think grass fed ribeye, strawberry bread pudding with berries from Westmoreland Berry Farm, even fingerling potatoes) then freezes them in airtight packages that just need to be thawed and popped in a pot of boiling water, usually for 10 minutes, and voila! A chef-prepared well-balanced meal all ready for your consumption.

I’ve been trying out dishes for the past few weeks on nights where I have no time to cook, and have adored Chef Friendly’s meatballs in tomato sauce, corn and red peppers, smoked pork and more. Meal delivery is pricey, the standard 7 meals per week is $150 per person, but I had the smarts to buy a Groupon for half price, which just about equaled my bougie Whole Foods grocery bill.