Blue Apron Goodness in a Box

Original post date on 5/26/15 on Sunday Supper Chronicles Blog

GS: For my birthday, my brother sent this box from Blue Apron. We weren't familiar with the company, but were impressed from the minute we opened it.

You get seasonal recipes created by their culinary team & renowned guest chefs and the recipes never repeat during the same year. Every meal is within 350-700 calories and take only 35 minutes to prepare - if you follow the instructions to a tee!

Every ingredient is individually packaged and labeled and also perfectly pre-measured so there’s no waste. The recipes are easy to read, easy to do and delicious! The first box was a gift from my brother but we were so sold with the first box, we joined the service and we have really enjoyed making the dishes.

There are some minor cons to Blue Apron. The biggest one being that once you've joined, you have to be diligent about going online to your account to cancel meals you don't want, otherwise they'll send you a box each week. They also only give you a month's worth of recipes to review, which is great but you can't cancel any further than that. The plan we signed up for, which is three meals made for a couple costs $60. When you do the math, it's $10 a person per meal. Meh, not bad for a monthly treat to ourselves. It's certainly cheaper than going out to eat! Since we can't afford this luxury every week I have to remind myself to jump online and cancel. I forgot to do that this week, which was fine because as far as timing was concerned, it did save me a trip to the grocery store and the first meal we cooked from this most recent box was delicious!

After initially receiving two boxes of great meals, I became very concerned with the sheer amount of waste involved with the packaging. There's the box itself and all the individual plastic bags and bottles that every ingredient comes in, which I knew were recyclable. It was, however, the large ice packs that I wondered about. I wondered if there was a service that allowed us to return the large ice packs back to Blue Apron. I jumped online and found out, much to our surprise, that packs are filled with a non-toxic gel. To recycle them completely we have to cut them open and dispose of the gel, then recycle the exterior packaging. After reading this info, I felt so much better about the whole process.

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Majority of the meals are fantastic and we have repeated the one pictured to the left already, in fact it was the first recipe we tried with Blue Apron (It's crispy catfish and cracked freekeh with kumquat, thai basil an chile glaze) and there's definitely others too that we will also cook up again.

And then there's some that won't be repeats - not because they weren't good, but it's more a preferential thing. For instance, I'm not a fan of plantains, so smooshing them up and serving them like mashed potatoes reminded me of baby food with every bite. We have also worked with ingredients we wouldn't have typically bought on our own. For instance, I've seen and eaten watermelon radish before, but I have never personally used it to cook ourselves. I was in love after my first knife cut into this vegetable, it was so stunningly beautiful! The red rice salad served with the chile-blackened cod was so nutty and crunchy, it was delicious that I can't wait to buy red rice on my own. Thanks to Blue Apron, I forgot how good snap peas are and am now growing them in my garden. I also love how the dishes we are making are from all over the world; the Middle East, Africa, France, Asia, and so on.

I think Blue Apron meals make a great gift and I can't wait to gift this to other people like my brother did for me. Don't you think this would be a great idea to send to someone on a stay-cation, or gift to a foodie couple on their honeymoon locale that has a kitchen? One of their tag lines is: Give the Gift of Home Cooking. Indeed!