Blue Apron - A Trial Run

The latest craze in home cooking is meal kits.  It seems like all of a sudden a bunch of companies popped up offering the service of delivering pre-portioned raw ingredients with detailed recipe cards.  The kits allow you to create a meal without all the prep work and leftover ingredients you may never use again.  When our kiddo was born, our friends kindly gifted us a free week to one of the most popular of these services - Blue Apron.

The whole process is pretty cool.  When you subscribe, you visit the website each week to see what meal kits are being offered and then pick which ones you'd like to receive.  They try to offer a nice mix of meat and vegetarian dishes.  When the box arrives, all the ingredients are packaged carefully and clearly labeled.  The recipe cards are very detailed, which great photographs for people who are more visual learners (like Mel).  They even include all the nutrition facts.  It really is a great system!  

We were able to receive three meals with our gift week.  We really enjoyed making all of them, and found it very easy to follow the recipe cards to create some delicious meals.

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Spicy Shrimp Coconut Curry

We liked the flavors, but it came out a little bit watery.  Mel realized we may have needed to let the sauce simmer a bit longer to make it thicker, but our stomachs were growling and we rushed it.  Never cook hangry.

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Moroccan Chicken

 

 

This dish smelled so good while simmering, and we wanted to lick the sauce off the plate.  Phenomenal.

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Chipotle-Glazed Meatloaf

As far as meatloaf goes, this one was pretty tasty with a nice kick from the peppers.  We just wish the ingredients provided had yielded a bit more sauce, but that's a personal preference.  We are decidedly a saucy household when it comes to food.

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Overall, the whole Blue Apron experience was pretty cool!  We may not sign up for a weekly account at the moment just because we still kind of enjoy the process of finding recipes to try on our own.  But once in a while, it could definitely be fun to let someone else take the wheel on meal planning and have a nice kit arrive at the door.