Me Time Meals: Home-Style Cantonese Cooking, One Box at a Time

There is a particular kind of tired that arrives at seven in the evening. The work is done, or done enough. The fridge has three things in it and none of them is dinner. You know perfectly well what you should eat — and you also know that between here and eating it lies a shop, a chopping board, a hot stove and a sink full of pans.

Most people, at that point, order something fried.

Me Time Meals exist for that hour. One box, one proper meal, cooked the same morning in our Richmond kitchen and delivered to you ready to steam.

Cooking for one is the hardest cooking there is

This is the part nobody warns you about. Recipes serve four. A bunch of greens turns yellow before you reach the end of it. Half a packet of anything sits in the fridge as a small daily reproach. The effort-to-reward ratio of cooking a single portion properly is brutal, and it is the most common reason people who know exactly how to eat well quietly stop doing it.

It happens to two groups in particular.

People whose working lives have swallowed the evening. Not because they don’t care about food — often precisely because they do, and a rushed sandwich feels worse than no meal at all.

Older adults who cooked for a whole family for thirty or forty years, and now find the house quiet and the effort no longer worth it for one plate. Skipping meals or living on toast is common, and it matters more with age, not less: healthy eating gets harder with age, as appetite fades and preparing food takes more effort, and it matters more, at exactly the point when cooking gets least appealing.

A meal that simply arrives removes the whole calculation.

What arrives

One box, three parts:

A main dish, chosen from the two on that weekday’s menu. This is home cooking, not health food — 柱侯牛白腩, 豉汁蒸排骨, 梅菜蒸龍雪魚, 家鄉廣東叉燒 — the Cantonese dishes people actually make at home, with Taiwanese 滷肉, Hakka 鹹雞, Japanese curry and Thai lemon fish coming round in the rotation.

Vegetables, cooked the same morning rather than blanched days ahead.

The day’s multigrain rice, chosen over white for more fibre and more bite in a meal eaten every day. No choosing needed.

Less oil and less salt is a design decision, not a garnish. Food built to be eaten every day has to be seasoned differently from food built to impress once. Most people in Canada eat more sodium than they need, and takeout is a large part of why. Cooking a little lighter is how a daily meal stays a daily meal.

What comes round

Two mains are offered each weekday, and across a typical month roughly fifty different dishes come through without repeating. That matters more than any single dish does: the reason people give up on meal delivery is boredom, not quality.

Here is the repertoire from the last two months, grouped so you can see the balance.

Beef — 柱侯牛白腩 Chu Hou braised beef brisket · 蕃茄牛腩 tomato braised brisket · 薯仔牛腩 brisket with potatoes · 沙茶牛腩 satay brisket · 滷水牛腱 marinated beef shank · 沖菜蒸牛肉 steamed beef with pickled mustard greens · 京蔥炒牛肉 stir-fried beef with scallions · 豆豉青椒炒牛肉 stir-fried beef with black bean and green pepper · 紅燒牛肉 braised beef · 免治牛肉 minced beef

Pork — 家鄉廣東叉燒 homemade Cantonese char siu · 秘製蜜汁叉燒 honey-glazed char siu · 豉汁欖角蒸豬肉 steamed pork with black bean and preserved olive · 麵豉蒸豬肉 steamed pork with bean paste · 豆豉蒸排骨 steamed ribs with black bean · 煎焗排骨 pan-fried and baked ribs · 腐乳煎焗排骨 pan-fried and baked ribs with fermented beancurd · 南乳花生炆五花腩 pork belly braised with fermented red beancurd and peanuts · 黑豆炆豬腩 pork belly braised with black beans · 鹹蝦醬豆腐蒸五花肉 steamed pork belly with tofu and salted shrimp paste · 鹹蛋蒸肉餅 pork patty with salted egg · 土魷蒸肉餅 pork patty with dried squid · 鹹魚蒸豬肉 steamed pork with salted fish · 洋蔥煎豬排 pan-fried pork chop with onions · 日式咖喱豬扒 Japanese curry pork chop · 台式滷肉配蛋 Taiwanese braised pork with egg · 紅燒豬肉 braised pork · 木須肉 moo shu pork · 滷水拼盤 marinated platter

Chicken — 薑蓉白切雞 poached chicken with ginger · 客家鹹雞 Hakka salt-baked chicken · 鮮沙薑雞 chicken with sand ginger · 三杯雞 three-cup chicken · 藥膳蒸雞 herbal steamed chicken · 養生桑拿雞 “sauna style” herbal steamed chicken · 霸王花蒸雞 steamed chicken with dried night-blooming cereus · 冬菇蒸雞 steamed chicken with shiitake · 金針雲耳蒸雞 steamed chicken with enoki and wood ear · 栗子炆雞 braised chicken with chestnuts · 豉油雞腿 soy-sauce chicken leg · 薑蔥炒雞腿 stir-fried chicken thigh with ginger and scallions · 薑蔥焗雞翼 baked wings with ginger and scallions · 菠蘿蜜汁雞翼 pineapple and honey-glazed wings · 瑞士雞翅 Swiss-sauce wings · 照燒雞排 teriyaki chicken steak · 青咖喱雞 green curry chicken · 蕃茄雞腿 tomato braised chicken leg · 腐乳雞腿 fermented beancurd chicken leg

Duck — 冬瓜炆鴨 braised duck with winter melon · 薑母鴨 ginger duck

Fish and seafood — 梅菜蒸龍雪魚 steamed turbot with preserved vegetables · 蒜蓉豆豉蒸龍雪魚 steamed turbot with garlic and black bean · 剁椒蒸魚 steamed fish with chopped chilli · 金針雲耳蒸黑魚 steamed snakehead with enoki and wood ear · 味極煎黑魚 pan-fried black fish with premium soy · 乾煎黑魚 dry-pan-fried black fish · 泰式檸檬魚 Thai-style lemon fish · 煎三文魚 pan-fried salmon · 白灼基圍蝦 poached prawns · 芹菜炒蝦球 stir-fried shrimp with celery · 芹菜蓮藕炒帶子 stir-fried scallops with celery and lotus root · 清蒸帶子豆腐 steamed scallops with tofu · 鮮帶子蒸蛋 steamed egg with fresh scallops

Tofu, egg and vegetables — 麻婆豆腐 mapo tofu · 紅燒豆腐 braised tofu · 魚香茄子 fish-fragrant eggplant · 肉碎蒸蛋 steamed egg with minced pork · 海參蒸蛋 steamed egg with sea cucumber

How the week works

Meals run Monday to Friday, with no service on statutory holidays. The menu is published a week at a time and you order in advance — which is not an administrative preference but a consequence of how the food is made. Everything is cooked to order in the morning rather than produced in bulk and held, so the kitchen has to know the numbers before the day starts. Ordering a week ahead also means you choose while the popular dishes are still there.

This is not a confinement meal

Worth stating plainly, because the two get confused. Our confinement meal plans are a completely different product: a full day of food designed around postpartum recovery — three meals, two herbal soups, daily nourishment and supplements, delivered every day for four to seven weeks. That is a recovery programme, and a confinement meal is emphatically not a bento box.

A Me Time Meal is one box, one meal, for an ordinary busy week. Families often end up using both: the mother on a confinement plan, and her partner — or the grandparent who has come to help — eating Me Time Meals alongside her, so that nobody is cooking at the hardest possible moment.

To order or ask a question

Call 604 363 4448, or message us to get on the coming week’s list. Places each week are limited by what the kitchen can cook fresh in a morning, so earlier is better.