Blue Apron Subscription Box Review & Coupon – October 2016

Blue Apron is a subscription box for making great meals at home. If you’re like me, you periodically find yourself in a serious cooking rut. You make the same things every week, but the thought of researching a recipe and acquiring all of the ingredients is just too much work. Blue Apron is the solution! Each week, Blue Apron sends you a refrigerated box with all the fresh ingredients you need to make the included recipes. You can select the 2-person plan – 3 meals a week of 2 portions each – or the family plan – 2 to 4 meals a week of 4 portions each. The menus are set, but you can ask Blue Apron to avoid ingredients you don’t eat – shellfish and lamb, in my case.

Pricing: 2-Person Plan – $59.94 for 3 recipes. Family Plan (serves 4) – $69.92 for 2 recipes, $139.84 for 4 recipes.

We got the Family Plan for 2 meals. I set the delivery date and it arrived right on time, securely packaged in a heavy-duty box. All of the ingredients are wrapped in an adorable insulated blanket and cooled with ice packs. Mine took a day to arrive and sat on my porch for 3 hours, and everything was perfectly cool inside.

The meat is at the bottom, surrounded by still-frozen gel ice packs. The chicken was double-bagged in an extra ziptop bag, so no concerns about leakage. The produce, unlike last month, was all in good shape. It helped that we mostly had sturdy produce, like turnips and kale, but even the arugula was intact.

The first recipe in our box was the Seared Chicken with Turnip, Apple, and Barley Salad. This is your standard protein-plus-grain meal, with a bit of kale thrown in to break up the white. As usual, all of the ingredients were included, even a tiny portion of apple cider vinegar.

Blue Apron does a great job of sending you just the amount you need for the recipe, so you don’t waste anything; nor do you have to think about how much to add to the recipe. Easy peasy.

Each recipe comes with these easy-to-follow instructions. Even if you are new to knife skills, you will be able to do everything on this list.

New this month is an insert with the meal’s nutrition facts. As you can see, these are a bit… rounded… so, take them with a grain of your recommended daily sodium intake. However, I do think it’s nice to have a ballpark idea of how this meal fits into my daily nutrition. Thumbs up.

This recipe was straightforward to make – really just an upgrade to your standard “chicken and rice” dinner.

This all came together nicely, and I congratulated myself on FINALLY reading the whole recipe before I started, so I made sure the barley had plenty of time to get going before I started in on the actual cooking. The chicken was simple – olive oil and salt/pepper, which suited everyone’s tastes. The barley salad probably could have benefitted from some “setting” time – the turnips didn’t really blend with the salad in flavor. The apples, however, were delicious.  (Since I peeled the apples before putting them in, we got to play the fun “apple or turnip” game with every bite!)

This was straightforward, tasty, and everyone liked it, including the kids. There was plenty leftover for Saturday lunch.

Our next recipe was Butternut Squash and Fontina Calzones with Apple and Arugula Salad.

The recipe card had straightforward instructions that were easy to follow.

I admit it – I’ve never actually butchered a butternut squash, and I was a little intimidated. I am here to tell you, though, that it is not substantially harder than dealing with a sweet potato. Without this Blue Apron box, I probably would have kept avoiding squash prep my whole life, but now I’m not afraid of it, so yay!

This recipe also included the nutrition facts.

This all came together beautifully, and we had a lot of fun as a family making calzones for dinner on Saturday. I do call shenanigans on the glossy golden calzones on the recipe card – you need an egg wash to get that gorgeousness, not just olive oil. We also added a fair amount of extra cheese to our calzones, as the recipe called for essence-of-cheese, which is not how my family rolls. The salad was delicious, too. I really liked this recipe, because it was seasonal (apples and squash), interesting in flavor, and everyone could get involved in the production. It was everything I want in a meal kit subscription box!

Everyone enjoyed the meals that came in the box this month. The ingredients were in good condition, and it’s nice to not have to decide “what’s for dinner” all the time. Overall, Blue Apron has been enjoyable and gets us out of our boring dinner routine. Honestly, you can forget how fun cooking can be. Interesting ingredients, easy recipes, and delicious food. We can’t wait to see what we get next time!

Visit Blue Apron to subscribe or find out more! Save $30 on your first order! Use this link – no coupon code required!