Donning our Blue Apron

As you probably know (if you know us at all), we love food.  We love cooking food and having food cooked for us, we love fancy food and trashy food, we love eating food at home and going out and eating food in restaurants or out of trucks or off grills in parks - you get the idea.  Since we've always done a fair amount of cooking at home, and we enjoy it, we've toyed in the past with the idea of a meal kit delivery service like Hello Fresh or Blue Apron; however, since you used to have to sign up for four-five meals each week (and we were actually going places and doing things fairly often back in the Before Times), we were worried we'd end up wasting the food and the money we'd spend on the service.  

And then this little thing called COVID-19 happened.  Right-o.

Due to the events of the past year, we've been spending more time eating food at home than ever; although we still grab takeout or run up our rewards points on Uber Eats twice a week or so, most of our meals are cooked at home and then portioned out for easy leftover lunches for the next few days.  We have a stable of solid recipes we really enjoy and that are relatively healthy, but after a year of those, we decided it might be time to shake it up and consider giving the meal kits a try again.

After doing some research and reading reviews on the tons of services out there (one article mentioned ONE HUNDRED different types of kits - that is too dang many), we picked Blue Apron; for our specific needs, they seemed to have the best mix of flexible plans, interesting recipes, and variety of options.  I clicked on the pop-up ad for the promotion they were currently running, and we signed up!

We've now cooked and finished off the recipes for two full boxes, so I figured it was time to report on how it's working for us.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX?!?!?!

When you sign up, you pick the day of the week you'd prefer to have your delivery dropped off.  The website suggested Saturday for us, and so far, that's worked out pretty well.  Our very first box was delayed by one day, so it came on Sunday instead, which wasn't an issue.  We find that our willingness to cook and eat healthy leaps out of the gate strong near the beginning of the week and wanes substantially as the weekend appears on the horizon, so starting out Monday evening with sets of ingredients for three healthy meals, already pre-portioned, has been good so far.

Ooh, are you ready for some unboxing pictures?  I hear it's all the rage with the kids these days.

B*tch, put me on the YouTubes.

I am READY.

Okay, so yeah, there's raw food in there, so within the box itself (carboard, easy to recycle) is one of those foil-y cool bags you see near the freezers at Costco (ah, the days when we walked around inside Costco...).  Inside the cool bag are a few ice packs that are filled with this interesting gel substance, rather than actual water/ice.  I imagine this stays frozen longer than water, which came in handy when our first delivery was delayed by a day.  After we remove the ice packs, we put them in our sink, over to one side, so they can finish defrosting.

Once they defrost, you just run the faucet

and wash the goo down the drain
(I normally run the disposal as well, and that helps).

It works pretty well, but it does look a bit odd.

Like ectoplasm.

We picked the three meals per week plan, although BA is always happy to have you add more to your weekly box (or more than one box per week).  When you sign up, you pick which set of meals you'd like - vegetarian, premium, all/assorted, or wellness.  We chose wellness; these are the ones that are a bit lower in calories, and while some are strictly veggie, some come with fish or chicken as well.  It looks like BA partners with Weight Watchers to produce some of their recipes (or have them certified by WW, I guess), and the WW counts for those are noted on the website and the BA app.

Each week, we can go on the website or the app to see what's coming the following week, and as long as we get in there around 5-6 days before the delivery date, we can switch things around as we'd like.  Three meals are always pre-selected for us based on our "wellness" preference, but we can change them up however we want.

Here's the website showing me our upcoming delivery scheduled for March 27:

If you want to make this bigger,

just click the picture.

The site's already selected the three wellness meals for the week for us, but we could click that blue "Change Recipes" button near the top, if we wanted to remove the salmon and add something else, for example.

Back to the box!  

Here's what we saw when we opened the box and cool bag:

How much do you love that the little bits and bops

(the itty bitty ones that would be lost otherwise)
are in bags labeled, "Knick Knacks?"

One of the things I'm not super duper keen on with a service like this is how much packaging comes along in each box.  Because every item you're cooking with is exactly the amount you need for just that one recipe, you end up with a plastic container for 10 cherry tomatoes, a plastic bag that held four tortillas, a teeny, tiny 2 ounce bottle of soy sauce, and so on.  It's not overwhelming by any stretch of the imagination (and they try to keep it in check with the "Knick Knacks" bag - you get one of those per recipe), and I don't completely see how they could avoid it, but it is worth noting.

Here's the packaging for one single, solitary egg.

At least this can be recycled.

We immediately realized we needed to find a specific spot to put all of these ingredients in our fridge, so no one ate all of the tortillas for the black bean tacos, for example (that could very well happen in our house).  We sacrificed one of our produce drawers, and it's working out pretty well so far.

The box also contains a recipe card for each meal you're cooking:

Our first week's set of cards

The cards are sturdy - thick, laminated cardstock - and we've saved a couple in our recipe binder for potentially recreating them again later on our own.  They also detail out exactly how much of everything you need (those are all the ingredients on the front - I like that they give you actual amounts, like 6 ounces of chicken, so you could theoretically make them all on your own), and the back breaks down the preparation step by step.  The cards don't include nutritional info (calories, etc), but you can get those from the website or app.

Let's get cooking!  For our first meal, we made the Sheet Pan Panko-Baked Cod.  Tell us what to do, recipe card!

An area that could be improved is for the recipe card

to list what equipment you'll need to make each meal.

This one required a few mixing/prep bowls,

cutting boards and knives,

plus two baking sheets.

Not a big deal in our kitchen,

but if you weren't as well stoked,

a clearer/earlier heads-up would be nice.

All of our ingredients, all layed out.

Makes my OCD so happy.

Making the panko crust...

...and putting it on the cod!

Mixing the beans and tomatoes...

...and adding them to the sheet pan with the squash.

The finished product!

Yum!

Truly, this one was delicious, and we're still chasing the high from this first recipe.  If we see this one come up again, we'll be sure to add it to our box for the week.  During this week, I had a massage appointment on Tuesday night, so Chris made the Sambal Chicken at home on his own and saved me my half (he had a team meeting for one of his classes, so he ate early, while I ate when I got home).  Although we prefer to cook them together, it is doable so far for one person to handle each recipe on his/her/their own.

The finished Sambal Chicken.

This one was just okay for me - 

Chris liked it better than I did.

Due to the way the schedule worked out this week, we ended up making the final recipe, the Shakshuka, during the workweek for lunch one day.  Again, it was doable to squeeze the cooking into a full lunch hour, but it took most of it, despite this being one of their "quicker" recipes.

Ingredients: prepped!

You'll notice our own container of onion salt up there.

The recipe actually called for a shallot,

but when I took it out of the "Knick Knack" bag,

it was a bit too fuzzy for my comfort level,

so the onion salt subbed in for it.

I think the combo of this box being a day late (a Sunday),

and then us not cooking this until a Thursday

just pushed the shallot past its "best by" date
(also, we're keeping everything for BA meals in the fridge,

so the shallot may just have been too moist).

A cute little tub of curry paste.

Although we have a fairly well stocked spice rack,

it's nice to get little bits of things like this that we might not already have

(or we might not want to buy an entire container of).

In progress...

...eggs and spinach are in...

...and ta da!  All done!

This one was delicious, too.

Not quite as good as the cod,

but it's a solid second place right now.

So far, we've found that most of the meals, which are designed for two people (there is a four person kit option as well, but we just do the kits for two), fill us up appropriately.  A few recipes, like the shakshuka above, ended up stretching into a smaller third meal (the leftovers were my breakfast a few days later - I just poached up another egg and made a slice of toast to mop up the leftover juice).

Our second week of meals is displayed here:

We made the black bean/brussel sprout tacos on Monday, having a "cook together" night at home.

Prepping...

...slicing...

...helping!

(not really)

The finished product - another good one!

We found that the tacos were enough food

 on their own, so we saved the roasted

sweet potatoes and had them as a side

with BBQ pork sandwiches

for lunch on Friday.

I actually left the house and attended a "drive-in" drag show with a friend on Tuesday night, so Chris made the crispy skin salmon on his own; he said it was quite good, and he ate it the next day for lunch as well.  As is quickly becoming a habit, I cooked the shawarma cauliflower bowls for lunch on Thursday, and they were good, too.

We've learned a few things along the way: for example, when we made the cod that first night, in reading through the instructions on the recipe card, I said, "but if you put the fish in the oven separate from the veggies, and then put the veggies back in the oven once the fish is done, the cod will be cold by the time the veggies are complete."  The recipe cards present each step as a linear, one-piece-at-a-time flow (or at least, that's the way my brain read them), but really, several of the steps are happening at the same time.  If you were brand new to cooking, this might not be the best meal kit for you, since it seems to assume that you already know things like this.

Another thing we've learned is not to "salt and pepper" everything mentioned in the steps on the recipe card.  After my heart incident last summer (that's almost been a year now - holy crap!), we've really been careful about watching sodium intake, so the constant notes to "salt and pepper" items as you're cooking started to stick out to me as a bit excessive.  I did some hunting on the expanded recipe cards in the BA app, and I found that calories and other macros are given in two categories: "As Packed" (what the shipping box contains) and "As Prepared" (what you end up making at home using the steps and notes - essentially, the BA recipe assumes you have olive oil, salt, and pepper at home already - they don't provide you with those).

Check out the difference in the percentage of daily sodium between the two columns for the shawarma cauliflower bowls:

That's an increase from 17% of your daily sodium to 42%, just by adding "salt and pepper" to pretty much every step on the recipe card.  INSANE.  So, now we just "pepper" each time it's required, and we add just a bit of salt once we've served it, if the final product ends up needing more flavor (normally, this isn't an issue, since the spices are really robust).

Since I'm sure someone reading this is interested, our weekly bill for Blue Apron is $60; that's for three meals, each one serving two people.  So, it works out to $10 per person per meal, which seems understandable, if a bit on the pricey side, given what you would pay for buying all of these ingredients on your own.  On the one hand, the service does all of the measuring and sourcing prep for you, but on the other hand, you still have to actually cook it, and if you don't do so before the ingredients go bad, you lose the money you spent on them (even though that's your own fault).  The meals are interesting, and if you make them properly, they are close to restaurant quality; plus, other than the one fuzzy shallot from the first box, the ingredients have really looked great, and BA seems to source from good places.

Overall we're liking the service so far.  It's been a fun deviation from having to meal plan every day and night in order to ensure there's food in the house, and the meals we've received have all been unique and tasty.  Stay tuned for more updates, including if we actually keep this going once we're able to visit with friends and go out and eat in real restaurants again.  Also, this is one of those services that is constantly being like, "TELL YOUR FRIENDS!  HERE'S FREE MEALS!  WE'LL BUY THEM A CAR!" (okay, maybe not the last one), so if anyone is interested, I'm sure I have a code I can find to give you a discount - just lemme know.  

Later!

Amy