Food || Cooking at Home with Blue Apron
You all know I love cooking and having friends over for dinner. I love trying out new recipes and pampering my friends with special dishes when they come over. My cookbook collection keeps growing and I just love planning the menu and setting a beautiful table for them. However; dinners during the week are quite a different story. Plastic placemats come out and the dinner menus are simple and predictable (think pan-seared salmon, a steamed vegetable, and a carb like rice or pasta). Week in and week out this is pretty much it. After a while weeknight dinners can get repetitive and boring. I have gotten stuck in a rut with the same easy, tried and true recipes. But let me tell you how our weeknight dinners received an upgrade this last week thanks to Blue Apron.
Recently, Blue Apron reached out to me to see if I was interested in trying their meal service....Fresh ingredients, with chef-designed recipes delivered straight to your door? Yes, please! I was really excited about this collaboration and could not wait to see what it was all about. We received recipes and ingredients for two yummy meals for four, and they were life-changing! Blue Apron helped us break up the midweek routine. The meals were divine and the whole dinner experience was elevated from boring to exciting. Both dinners felt like a special occasion- with menus like 'Crunchy Pork Chops with Summer Squash Slaw and Roasted Potato Wedges' and 'Seared Cod and Miso-Roasted Japanese Eggpgplant with Cucumber-Soba Noodle Salad' it felt like we were dining at a restaurant. We all LOVED it! Weeknight dinners all of a sudden became exciting and more like a treat, so much so that I even found energy to create a beautiful table each night to showcase the delicious meals.
Here is how it works-
Blue Apron delivers farm-fresh ingredients (the produce was even prettier than the ones I would have picked myself at our local grocer) right to your door in exactly the right proportions (I hate measuring things so this was so nice to have!). You can chose a plan that meets your family meal needs. There is a family plan to feed a family of four (this is the one I tried). With this plan you can opt to receive one or two deliveries per week. In each delivery you get two family style meals. The price for this plan is $8.74 per meal per person or $69.92 per eight serving delivery. Shipping is always free.The 2-Person plan is great for couples with no kids where each meal comes out to $9.99 per person per meal or $59.94 for three meals per week. I find the prices to be very reasonable and attractive even. The quality of the meal is spectacular!
The Blue Apron recipes are delivered in a refrigerated box so everything will stay fresh even if you aren't home to greet the package. They just launched in Texas and they ship to most of the country. Also, you can skip a week or cancel at any time. And shipping is always free! Even better than the super market where you have to pay for gas! And in this heatwave I hate leaving the house!
So, we received a box like this-
with these beautiful ingredients-
And the easy to follow recipe cards.
The two recipes we tried were divine. All their ingredients are fresh and sourced from quality suppliers and artisans. The best part is that the gourmet tasting meal only takes about 40 minutes or less to prepare. Here is our first meal- the "Crunchy Pork Chops with Summer Squash Slaw and Roasted potato Wedges"
The second recipe was 'Seared Cod and Miso-Roasted Japanese Eggplant with Cucumber Soba-Noodle Salad".
Mouth watering yet?! If so, the first 20 readers will get 2 meals off their first Blue Apron order for free! Yeay!! Click here for more details.
My favorite part was spicing up our weeknight dinners and making things I would not think to make ordinarily. I also learned a lot from the two recipes I tried (about breading pork chops for example!) and I loved exposing Little Miss A, my almost 8 year-old, to more sophisticated ingredients. She really loved the Japanese eggplant for example, which I would have never thought to make or have her try! Here is a list of their recipes so you can get a sense for what they offer. There are so many I would love to try.
I'm so excited about this service and highly, highly recommend it. If you have been wanting to try it here is your chance! Remember the first 20 readers will get 2 meals off their first Blue Apron order free! Click here for more details. That sounds pretty good to me. Two meals is all it takes to get hooked.
Bon Appétit!! Bisous!
[this post was sponsored by Blue Apron. All opinions are my own. I genuinely loved the product and loved working with the brand]