You’re a working mom without a lot of free time between playing at the neighborhood jungle gym with Junior, dealing with those 15 pounds of unwanted flesh still hanging around from the holidays, and guests coming tomorrow night for dinner. I hope, for your sake, that you live in West Ballard.
The quasi-industrial looking strip mall near the Ballard Locks at 28th Avenue and Market Street is sort of like a self-help hall for the modern, on-the-go family. You can get a tan, you can work on your Curves, you can stow your extra stuff at a self-service storage facility. Within walking distance, there are indoor mountains suitable for scaling and one of those “Mommy and Me” group therapy/play group joints. And there is Grace’s Kitchen, because with all that there is to do, there’s no time for cooking and the take-and-bake philosophy isn’t just for Papa Murphy’s anymore.
Although Grace’s offers themed cooking classes and you can even rent out the entire place—along with the cooks and their recipe boxes—for a birthday, bridal shower, or other special event, the Kitchen’s main attractions are the fresh frozen dinners. With rotating monthly menus of about a dozen items at a time, there’s plenty to choose from, and because Grace isn’t actually a person but a state of mind, careful attention is given to fresh, quality ingredients. The entrées are prepared and packaged to feed two adults, and they’re all under 20 bucks.
Depending on what you choose, Grace’s frozen entrées may or may not be just the thing for those nights when you’re too tired to cook. Most Grace’s Kitchen dinners are best if thawed overnight in the refrigerator and some items, like the polenta lasagna with spicy turkey sausage ($14.50) are frozen solid and absolutely require it. The Gorgonzola and walnut ravioli in porcini and shallot sauce with braised artichoke hearts ($15.75) required three pans and some careful tending and timing. On the other hand, the rustic Matterhorn galette with escarole and cannellini bean soup ($14.25) was relatively easy to handle, once we made it through the unnecessarily clunky instructions; the pastry was thrown on a baking sheet in the oven and the soup into a pot on the stove. The ravioli were creamy and rich and stuffed extra thick, and there were plenty of them, but the chefs weren’t nearly as generous with the equally rich and flavorful mushroom sauce. Too bad. The galette, billed as a “free-form tart,” was layered with delicious roasted potato slices, chunks of salty pancetta, and creamy fontina cheese; fresh sage added a savory and complimentary zing and made it the hit of the night. The soup on the side was obviously prepared with fresh ingredients although it didn’t prove to be worth writing home about. Escarole, wheat berries, slivers of onion, and plenty of cannellini beans yielded a healthy, aromatic pleasure, but slurping it up was something of a letdown.
The next day, after giving it some time to thaw in the refrigerator, the Brazilian seafood stew ($15) was absolutely wonderful. Just a hint of coconut milk along with healthy doses of lemongrass and lime kicked up the essence of shrimp, mussels, calamari, and scallops perfectly. Clearly, Grace’s Kitchen is using premium ingredients and the dishes don’t stay in the freezer for long. We’re a long way from bland, gray TV dinners of yore, and I, for one, am not looking back.
But back to the issue of usability: Grace’s Kitchen isn’t exactly the kind of place you would pop into on your way home from a late night at the office—for one, it closes at 7 p.m. And the meals aren’t necessarily simple to prepare. Soups and sauces are frozen solid so just getting them out of their containers requires either some waiting time or some microwave time. But if, for instance, you’ve got family in town and you’re too busy sight-seeing and there’s no time to plan and execute a nice evening meal, Grace’s Kitchen could be a very good thing. After all, it is right next door to one of Ballard’s main attractions.
Grace’s Kitchen, 2821-C N.W. Market St., 206-297-FOOD, www.graceskitchen.com, BALLARD. 11 a.m.–7 p.m. Mon.–Fri.; 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Sat.
