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.
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.
Pricing: 2-Person Plan – $59.94 for 3 recipes. Family Plan (serves 4) – $69.92 for 2 recipes, $139.84 for 4 recipes.
DEAL: Save $30 on your first order! Use this link – no coupon code required!
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 was all in good shape this month.
Normally, we eat our box over the weekend, the exact days dependent on sports and activity schedules. This month, however, the weekend collapsed on us, and we had our whole box staring at us on Sunday. The items would definitely have stayed good into the week, but our schedule is even less flexible on weekdays, so we decided to knock out our box in one day–one for lunch, and the other for dinner. Leftovers will take us into midweek next week, so that’s exciting.
Our first meal (lunch) was the Spinach and Sweet Potato Quesadillas.
Quesadillas are always popular in our house. If we were having these for dinner, I might have been slightly concerned that there wouldn’t be enough food to keep everyone full all night, but lunch would be no problem.
As usual, all of the ingredients were included, even a tiny cup of sour cream. And look at the oaxaca cheese, all wound up like dough. So interesting! 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.
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. The recipe cards got a bit of a refreshed look this month – they have that lifestyle-blog-real-simple-white-kitchen-with-gray-cabinets look. More text, but I think that’s a good thing. The prep time was about right for this recipe, though we have an avocado allergy in the family, so no guac for us. Sad!
Now included in the box is the meal’s nutrition facts. I think it’s nice to have a ballpark idea of how this meal fits into my daily nutrition. Thumbs up.
This meal was straightforward to make, even it was a bit involved for lunch. I always roast at 425 instead of 450 in my oven; your oven may vary. As noted in the recipe comments, the amount of cheese was a little light for all of the quesadillas, so we added a bit of cheddar from the fridge. We threw in another sweet potato, too. I didn’t really mind the additions because I had them handy, but this has been an occasional issue with Blue Apron. For $70, I don’t really want to add ingredients.
This all came together nicely. We have an electric griddle, which made cooking these easier. I also buttered them instead of oiling the griddle, because butter is delicious. (And is the only way to get that nice golden color from the recipe cards, btw). Everyone liked these a lot, even my dubious-about-veg husband. The spice blend for the sweet potatoes (mostly cumin) was tasty, and the flavors all went together really well. With some chips on the side, these definitely would have been enough for dinner. A margarita would have been nice, too, but not so good for Sunday productivity. Thumbs up!
Next up (four hours later) was the Cashew Chicken Stir Fry.
Given that the cashews were a garnish, it might be overstating it to lead with that in the recipe title. But it looked like a tasty Sunday night dinner.
The recipe card has straightforward instructions that were easy to follow. I don’t really know how they decided what was prep and what was cooking, but about 45 minutes altogether was about right. Save yourself some heartache and grate that ginger instead of mincing it.
This recipe also included the nutrition facts.
There was a fair amount of dashing around the kitchen to cook this one, but there wasn’t anything hard about it.
This was a pretty satisfying Sunday meal, in that everything-in-one-bowl way. It kind of reminded me of my dorm cafeteria’s Sunday night rice-and-mystery-protein-glop, which I admit I loved. Anyway, the kids and husband gave this two thumbs up. I personally thought it was a bit under-flavored. With the soy glaze and sesame oil, I thought it would be a bit more flavorful than it was. But it was different than our usual, and it was sufficiently tasty. Good enough for me.
A month of wins! 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!
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