Blue Apron Box #1

Daniel and I woke up early this morning and headed to Running Wild for the new (summer) Thursday morning group run. There was a good turnout and everyone kind of did their own thing, distance wise. After that Lizzie and I hit the tennis courts for a little bit, continuing my efforts to “cram” for the state tennis tournament next week. I am making some good progress on that!

I am obsessed with my new coffee cup. Do more of what makes you happy. I think this shall be my new motto 🙂

I mentioned this in my previous post, but we recently decided to sign up for Blue Apron, which is a meal delivery service that delivers fresh ingredients and recipes directly to your home.

I am extremely lazy when it comes to food preparation, but this is something that I am really trying to work on. In the past, I have blamed my lack of time as the reason for said laziness, but now since I have more time on my hands I have decided to try to make some healthy changes!

Blue Apron comes highly recommended and seemed like a wonderful start for me. My goal is to be intentional about making “cooking” a priority now in hopes that when I am back working more it will just come naturally. What is it they say?

I hadn’t heard about Blue Apron until recently, and so for those others of you that haven’t heard much about it, here is how it works …

First you go online to sign up. You can choose between a 2 person or family plan. The two person plan is 3 meals per week and the cost is $9.99 per person/per meal. The family plan is for four people, can be 2 or 4 meals per week, and the cost is $8.74 per person/per meal.

Then you schedule your delivery. You can choose a delivery day that works best for your schedule and you can skip any week that you don’t want to receive a box, as long as you do it 7 days in advance.

Once you are all signed up, then you get a box of fresh, pres-measured, pre-proportioned ingredients. All of the ingredients are labeled well which is really nice since Blue Apron often uses some new, exotic ingredients in their recipes. You may not know what a certain ingredient is, but if it is labeled it makes it easier. I love that the ingredients are pre-measured so that there is no waste. I always seem to have too much of something when I cook, so Blue Apron is helping me to keep the cost per meal down since I am only paying for exactly what we use.

There are detailed recipe cards (made out of sturdy card stock) in the box. On the front they have the ingredients laid out in a picture, the final product, and a list of the ingredients with the nutritional breakdown of your meal. On the back there are step-by-step pictures with directions. The recipes are seasonal and are never repeated in the same year. As someone who hasn’t done a lot of cooking over the years, the process was not intimidating at all and I was able to follow the recipe cards very easily.

Tonight we cooked our first meal and it was really good! We made seared cod with spring vegetables and lemon-mustard vinaigrette.

Here are the fresh ingredients …

And the cooked veggies …

Final product …

And we had a nice sunset to go along with our meal.

Our first Blue Apron experience was wonderful! I am excited to cook the other two meals now as well. Our next two meals will be seared steaks with mashed potatoes and hoisin-glazed chicken meatballs with zucchini and brown rice. If they are as good as tonight’s meal, we are definitely in for a treat.

Anyone else out there tried Blue Apron? What have your experiences been like?