The first meal I ever cooked for myself was ramen. The next 12 were all, also, ramen. So were a sizable percentage of the next hundred. By age 11, as a latchkey kid, I had mastered the art of the Maruchan egg drop, the sliced green onion, the chili and soy sauce and mushroom additions. I learned, early, my love of cumin and coriander. Any ingredient, actually, seemed fair game.

And so when I say I still felt a little swell of pride last month after composing a handsome ramen bowl from a HelloFresh delivery meal kit, I speak as a man of great experience.

I kid somewhat, but it’s true: Packaged home ramen has long been the food of the weary, not the proud. And this was a rainy Tuesday, after hours at work. But by the time I got done drizzling chili oil over a pork-chicken shoyu ramen bowl topped with a lightly seared breast of sesame-grilled chicken, heavy laden also with freshly sautéed mushroom and wilted spinach, I felt like I’d accomplished something noteworthy. Not only did dinner look delicious, I did a thing. On a Tuesday. Without trying too hard.

This is the promise of meal kits like HelloFresh—the reason people pay more than groceries, but less than any decent delivered meal, to receive them. It is the promise of a better, but still manageable vision of domesticity—one that involves you making a well-conceived meal without actually doing the work of, well, conceiving it.

Light, Bright, Maybe Even Cosmopolitan

HelloFresh—which, like a lot of popular delivery meal kits, began in Germany—is arguably the most successful popularizer of the form. A box of ingredients arrives each week, individually portioned and bagged for meals whose recipes are printed on accessible one-sheets, with plucky little graphics. All you need is pots, pans, a stove, and some basic oil- and salt- and butter-type staples.