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.
The Blue Apron website got a redesign recently, and you now have more options from which to choose for your meals. It’s easy to switch up or add meals to your box.
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.
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 $50 over your first two boxes! Use this link – no coupon code required!
The meat is at the bottom, surrounded by still-frozen gel ice packs. Blue Apron is always aiming for optimization with the packaging, and packaging nerds like myself are into it. The meat is now double-bagged in sealed packages, which is great for keeping errant meat juice inside.
It’s April, time for being outside, finally! First up, Smoky Pork Burrito Bowls.
As usual, all of the ingredients were included.
Handy nutrition guides!
Who doesn’t like bowls of burritos? All the produce looked good for this meal, though we quickly decided kale rice sounded like a terrible idea and ditched it for regular rice. You are the boss of your kitchen–if you don’t like kale, don’t eat kale. (Don’t eat kale).
Easy chopping here. And, yes, that’s a Blue Apron wine subscription bottle over there, too.
The carrot jalapeno slaw with honey was surprisingly delicious. Good job, Blue Apron test kitchen.
This was easy and pretty fast (the online reviews said it took 40 minutes, but maybe that’s if you mess around with the kale). Everyone liked it. Thumbs up on this one, and it’s definitely something you could make yourself another time.
Our second recipe was Mu-shoo (Moo-shu?) “style” chicken, which I guess means not-at-all-authentic but hopefully tastes good.
All of the produce was in good shape…
But we didn’t get the amount on the recipe card–3 chicken breasts instead of 4; 12 oz of cabbage instead of 16oz; and a measly 6oz of sweet potatoes instead of 16oz. Now, there was plenty of food, but it was weird. Time to update the cards, BA!
The directions, while straightforward, were also weird in that they again called for a high-heat pan cooking to the chicken, when you are going to shred it afterward. High heat simply doesn’t produce chicken that shreds. Last month I cooked it in the oven, and this month I used the slow cooker. I don’t know if it’s a constraint of wanting to stay in particular timing for the recipe (oven cooking takes 30-40 min) but it’s weird and I think does a disservice to new cookers who might not know how to change up a recipe on their own.
This tasted fine–really just a different flavoring to a chicken taco, which was a welcome change to the routine.
A couple of decent recipes to mix into our regular routines–we’ll take that as a win for April. Everyone’s really excited to see that pizza is on deck for our May box.
Hey, did you know that Blue Apron has a wine program now? It’s super easy to match your wine to your meal, like the delicious white blend we had with the chicken sandwiches.
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!
Any fun recipes to eat outside this spring? Let us know in the comments below!
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