Healthy Thyme serves restaurant quality food
Meal preparation requires a level of planning that can be difficult to execute with everything else on your to-do list. Fortunately, local food delivery service Healthy Thyme Dishes does all the work for you. Bonus: It’s healthy, too.
Healthy Thyme is a weekly food delivery business with a 23-item menu, 12 of which are changed regularly. Owner and chef Landen Ganstrom is known for his mac and cheese, a dish that has won six separate awards at the Charleston Mac Off. Ganstrom also opened Crave Kitchen and Cocktails in Mount Pleasant in 2008 and Mac Daddy food truck in 2015.
But when the pandemic hit, Ganstrom said he realized he was no longer enjoying life outside of work. “There was Crave, Woodward Tavern, Mill Street Tavern [and] Mac Daddy food truck [at the time]. There was a lot to manage and I wasn’t spending a lot of time with my family.”
The chef/fitness enthusiast was cooking for a few of his friends next door, so he decided to take his side job and turn it into one, as many do at the start of the pandemic.
“I started eating Healthy Thyme in the second week of Covid and I told my friends about it and put it on Facebook,” Ganstrom said. “I received 75 orders in the first week. I got 125 orders in the second week and six months later I’ve already reached 300 orders.”
Ganstrom quickly realized that he could not do this alone and enlisted some help. In 2020, he connected with Steve Wenger, former owner and CEO of Duvall Catering, who is showing a satellite kitchen on Azalea Road in North Charleston. Ganstrom and his team said they’ve delivered nearly 800 meals in recent weeks with the help of a culinary school graduate, several delivery drivers and “excellent” cuisine.
Healthy but delicious
While the chef’s fine-dining training and macaroni and cheese awards require a lot of butter, cheese, and cream, his goal with Healthy Thyme is to serve restaurant-quality, healthy meals.
“My passion is the health of food,” said Ganstrom. “I’d say 90% of the ingredients I use are organic or antibiotic-free, and I’m really strict about the type of chicken and beef I use.”
The chef uses pure coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil instead of oils like butter or canola oil for a healthier meal.
When designing the menu, the chef said that he cooked the dishes he wanted to eat; for example, almond crusted chicken tenders with zesty ranch, a product popular with customers.
The chicken is coated with a mixture of almond flour and hazelnuts, then baked in a convection oven. Ganstrom likened the convection oven to an air fryer, so it doesn’t add much oil to get the crispy crunch everyone is looking for in a chicken tender. Delicious ranch is made with homemade coconut yogurt, pickled jalapenos, and a few other secret ingredients.
Other popular dishes include the roast beef tenderloin, which the chef tossed with rosemary, thyme, thyme, garlic and black pepper.
If you’re following a plant-based diet, Healthy Thyme also offers dishes like lentil curry on kale, roasted cauliflower, beets, and grilled onions with lemon tahini sauce. The meal delivery service has many options for a variety of dietary choices such as gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carb, Whole30, vegan, vegetarian, and more. You can filter the weekly menu by any of these categories for easy selection.
In addition to the delicious lunch and dinner options, the menu features a few sweet items such as the swirling aroma of overnight oats, raspberry chia pudding, and the chef’s infamous Paleo moon bars.
He said moon bars are particularly popular and are made from pecans, walnuts, and palm shells, topped with coconut cream, and topped with vegan, dairy-free chocolate ganache.
Each meal is typically two servings, but Healthy Thyme also offers family-size meals equivalent to four servings. A new menu is released every Tuesday and orders must be placed by 14:00 on Monday. There is a $40 minimum per order, but no delivery fee. Meals are delivered to Daniel Island on Thursdays and to the rest of the Charleston area from Mount Pleasant to North Charleston and James Island on Fridays. If you live outside of the delivery radius, there is an option to get your meals from the company’s kitchen in North Charleston.
“A lot of people ask why I don’t deliver on Mondays, and there are two reasons for that,” Ganstrom said. “First, I’m going to have to work on the weekends, and that’s why I started it, to spend time with my family.
“Also, people are more likely to make bad decisions about food over the weekend. So if you have these fresh chef-made meals coming out on Friday, you have fresh food at least until Tuesday.
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