About a week ago, my first Blue Apron box arrived. When I got home from work there was a refrigerated box outside my front door. I brought the box inside and started unwrapping clearly labeled ingredients for three nights of dinner. I like my veggies full of color, fresh and crisp, but winter makes this challenging.
These veggies were perfect. The Farro Jambalaya dinner included pearled farro, maitake mushrooms as well as okra. I didn’t know how to pronounce these, let alone find them in a grocery store, but after I followed Blue Apron’s recipe, I had a delicious jambalaya dinner with ingredients I’d never even tried before. Overall, the recipes are easy to read and never stressed me out. Because each spice, vegetable, and grain is measured for two servings, it’s really easy whip up dinner. Sometimes the dinners are a quick 30 minutes, like the Shrimp Po’ Boy Sandwiches, which were surprisingly delicious We prepared the Po’ Boys, which was not exactly my first choice because I’m afraid of spicy ingredients. The recipe called for Tabasco sauce as well a Po’ Boy spice blend. The spice mix was used to season the shrimp and thankfully, the Tabasco sauce was served on the side. I have no idea what was in the spice mix, but the shrimp was full of flavor down to the last bite. It was served on a warm roll with homemade tartar sauce and it was better than any Po’ Boy I’ve eaten out. Dinner also included a salad, which at first seemed boring – a giant head of butter lettuce, an apple… I was so confused. As I proceeded to make the salad, I realized I was making my own dressing. It was just a little Dijon, vinegar, and lemon juice whisked together and it tasted amazing. The lettuce was fresh and the apple gave it a little bit of sweet crunch. All together it was definitely a restaurant-quality meal and we made it ourselves!I’m a foodie at heart, but I’m lost in the kitchen. My first week of Blue Apron was a fun experiment and I’m looking forward to trying it again. The quality of produce is comparable to what I find at a farmer’s market in the middle of summer and the seafood is the same freshness I expect to find at the fish market. I work all the time and Blue Apron is proving to be a better option than take-out while solving the proverbial question: “what should we have for dinner?” It’s nice to come home to a planned dinner, ingredients ready to go. Yes, you still have to cook it, but I like cooking and I love not going to 10 different stores to find specific ingredients. Their website allows you to turn on and off delivery each week, and that helps me fit them in to my life. I plan to try more weeks of Blue Apron, as it is the perfect compliment to my busy schedule.
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