Like most people, I shop a great diet. Antioxidant-packed fruit? Check. Rainbow-coloured fresh veg? Check. Organic fish and meat? Check. Trouble is, cooking the food is a different story. How often have you watched it languish in the fridge during a hectic week of unhealthy ready meals, lunch at the desk or restaurant food? I hold up my hands and admit that I belong to one of those typical British households that throws away a third of the food it buys.

In my post-lottery-win fantasy world, my nutrition-savvy personal chef does all the meal planning, shopping and preparation. Every dish is bursting with healthy and nutritious foods, and not so much as a goji berry goes to waste. Then I read about a new company, DinnersMade, that claims to offer the next best thing – at a price you can afford. It’s a concept known as “meal prep” – you turn up at a venue that looks like a restaurant kitchen, where all the ingredients for a choice of wholesome meals are waiting, ready-prepared, with step-by-step instructions, to be assembled into a dish by you. You then take your finished meals home to put in the fridge or freezer, following the simple cooking instructions (oven or microwave heating) when you want to serve them. No cooking is done on the DinnersMade premises, all the ingredients are prepared for you and there is no washing-up, so you can put together enough meals to feed a family of four for a month in less than two hours. When they are cooked, the meals taste homemade, fresh and modern, in a local gastropub sort of way.

Meal prep is perfect if you are pressed for time, but your conscience gives you a guilt trip when you feed your family ready meals and takeaways. All the ingredients are fresh, and there are no artificial flavourings, preservatives or colourings, so you could happily feed young children the spaghetti bolognese or fish bake with cheesy mash, knowing that it won’t trigger any additive-related behavourial problems. You can control the salt content of each meal, which is crucial for kids, as well as those with high blood pressure. And you can add or remove ingredients according to the tastes of those you are cooking for.

Until she discovered DinnersMade, Sarah Gooding, a banker and divorced mother of two young children, planned her children’s food with military precision. First, she created a spreadsheet outlining meals for the following two weeks, making sure that no meal was repeated. “That way, I was sure the family was eating a wide variety of nutritious dishes,” she says. “Once the two-week plan was done, I would make a list of necessary ingredients, order them all on the internet and spend the whole of Sunday cooking, while the children were with their father. It was exhausting and time-consuming, and meant I didn’t have much ‘me’ time. Since going to DinnersMade, I am less stressed and tired, and I’m having some fun on the one day off I have.”

DinnersMade doesn’t promote itself as a health-food company, but its chef, Steve Cox, works with a nutritionist to produce balanced meals. Each menu comes with a nutritional breakdown including calorie, saturated fat, fibre, protein, carbohydrate, salt and sugar content. If you bear a few principles in mind, it is easy to pick recipes that suit your health concerns. If you prefer low GI, then opt for dishes with more than 3g of fibre, such as butternut squash with gruyère and thyme or lamb dopiaza. Cutting down on saturated fat? Then choose meals that contain less than 10g of saturated fat per portion, such as sea bass with tomato and basil passata, prawn madras with coriander and lemon or chicken marengo.

You could also use DinnersMade as an effort-free way to lose weight, as each dish is calorie-counted and few contain more than 500 calories per portion. But the thing I really love is the convenience, as the most tedious and time-consuming aspects of cooking are removed – there’s no shopping, no washing, peeling, chopping or weighing of ingredients, no dirty pots and pans to spoil the look of your Corian work surfaces, and no washing-up. Cost-wise, at about £2.60 a portion, it is slightly more expensive than a luxury ready meal, but far cheaper than a takeaway or restaurant food.

Although it is possible to turn up and get stuck in, DinnersMade prefers clients to book a session in advance and choose the dishes they would like to make from the menu on the website. When you arrive, you are asked to wash your hands, kitted out with a white apron and disposable latex gloves, then shown to your first meal station. You follow the step-by-step instructions and place the ingredients laid out for you into a foil dish in the order shown on a laminated card.

This is what a top chef must feel like, I thought, as a willing assistant moved gracefully around me, silently restocking my ingredients and whisking away used utensils. An hour later, I had managed to prepare 10 family meals, including a squash and goat’s cheese lasagne for six people that I put together in less than 10 minutes (and anyone who has made a lasagne from scratch knows that it takes a minimum of an hour to prepare, with 20 minutes of washing-up afterwards).

At 11am on a Thursday, my immaculately dressed fellow meal-preppers looked as if they had squeezed in their sessions between hairstyling and lunch appointments. One said that she booked a monthly session with her daughter as a “relaxing and different way to meet up”. Another, who had popped in on impulse after a morning’s shopping, admitted that although she didn’t cook, she cared about what she ate. “I like DinnersMade because I know exactly what’s gone into it, and I can see for myself that the ingredients are fresh,” she said. “I don’t like the idea of eating food made in a factory.”

On one level, you could say it’s a pretty sad state of affairs when a service has to be created in order for you to live a “wholesome” lifestyle (as opposed to one filled with junk food). But the concept of paying to be healthier – and paying for more free time, for that matter – is on the increase. Just consider the buzz surrounding the new luxury organic-food mecca Whole Foods Market.

DinnersMade is backed by David Lloyd, the man behind the health clubs, and there are plans to launch 10 venues throughout the UK in the coming months. Lloyd launched the business after seeing the success of the industry in America: in 2003, there were five meal-prep venues in the USA; now there are 1,300.

Finally, take a tip from the model Caprice. She recently prepped a dinner party for 30 of her “close friends” at DinnersMade. Not only is it far cheaper than getting caterers in, it comes with the added kudos of saying that you made it all yourself.

DinnersMade sessions start at £72 for 24 servings, or £125 for 48; meals are also available individually (from £2). Call 0870 888 8247 or visit www.dinnersmade.co.uk for your nearest venue

The UK’s second meal-prep company, Voilà Meals, opened recently in London. Voilà Meals sessions start at £65 for 24 servings, with 72 servings from £170; 020 8905 9120, www.voilameals.com

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