One of the most difficult things in life is to not fall into a rut – do the same thing, day in and day out – get comfortable – and then, just as your bed gets warm and comfy, something comes along and tosses things everywhere – making a mess of the nice and tidy life that has been made – no, cultivated, all these years, and then feeling insulted, violated and resentful of the fact that the way of life is now in shambles, tattered and torn.
Or is it? After all, everything changes – the seasons, the circle of life and business cycles – each time the change is different and unique. The thing is, the changes that take place, more often than not usually are never, ever the way we do things, but what if the challenge of life is, even though things are done in a manner in which we wouldn’t do them-if we were open-minded and just a bit curious, would it possibly enhance life in a positive way? Deliver us, from our mundane ways and change us forever?
Yes, many things in our lives do this – graduating, marrying, babies, death. But on a much smaller scale, a little food deliver company called Blue Apron, has done this for me.
Blue Apron is a meal home delivery internet company. From the looks of it, one of the leaders in the home-prep delivery industry. You go on the internet, look over the meal options for the week (there are two meals, delivered once a week on a day of your choosing), relieve your wallet of $69.92 for four people (in the metro San Francisco Bay Area) and wait. Actually, I never relieved my wallet of any money, my cousin’s kid uses Blue Apron and received a free “box” to give away, so this is how I was introduced to Blue Apron.
On the appointed day, your meal arrives in a cardboard box on your doorstep. An ample number of cold packs are designed to keep your food cold if you are not present at time of delivery. The box comes with perfectly proportioned, locally farmed/and or sustainable fresh foods complete with recipe card(s) with cooking instructions.
For example, our first meal was Seared Beef & Goat Cheese Sandwiches with Purple Mashed Potatoes & Asparagus. Now here’s where the “this is not how I do things, let’s get out a rut” comes into play. Before Blue Apron, I had never heard of purple potatoes, I wouldn’t know a purple potato if it jumped up and smacked me in the face. In real life, they resemble the shape and size of a new potato, except it looks like a squid squirted its ink all over it! Had a seen one in the store, I don’t know that I would even entertain the idea of buying it! But here it was, on my kitchen counter, so instead of following the instinct to junk the purple potatoes and go back to my safe, new potatoes in the pantry, I forged on, preparing and mashing my purple potatoes with olive oil (another new thing, and at first blush, I felt a bit “out there”, foregoing that lovely cream and butter of your everyday, garden variety mashies!). The potatoes, although really weird looking, were actually very good! They were almost a sweet potato, but not quite; I don’t know what I was expecting, taste-wise, from a purple potato, but I guess what I got was better than how it looked. A dash of olive oil in the potatoes was a great lighter alternative to my usual cream and butter potatoes. I also created a simple feta/sour cream sauce accented by lemon juice. The lemon juice preparation was another way I deviated from my former mundane life – instead of slicing the lemon (which actually was a “pink” lemon, as a matter of fact, I’d never heard of a pink lemon before this either!) in half and squeezing it over the lemon juicer, the instructions said to cut it in quarters, seed it and squeeze each quarter into the mixture – and when I did, it gave me such squishy joy to feel that lemon juice run over my fingers and the lemon as the juice was leaving was a memory I’ll remember as one of the most lovely feels ever, like being a kid and feeling something new – it was luscious! The feta/sour cream sauce turned out to be a very simple, delicious sauce (kissed with “pink” lemon) that could actually be used as a dip for veggies or any other number of accompaniments! So far, I was very happy with this service, I was leaving my comfort zone, learning new things and finding new uses for the components of the meal! I’m feeling it was worth every penny I didn’t spend!
In the end, I got a meal that my family really liked, instead of the same old dinner which has gotten so boring and I learned a thing or two about food! It was a 2-pot meal, so clean up was a snap! It took about an hour, prep-to-table, so not very different than any other weekday meal I’d be preparing. Because of the pre-measured ingredients and step-by-step instructions (which, if you are a paper person, you can read off the paper that comes in the box, or if you are a computer person, you can read it off any one of your myriads of electric digital devices), it would not be a bad teaching tool (although pricey) for the budding chef in your life! In most instances, most teenagers (15 years old and up) who can handle a sharp knife and have a healthy respect for the heat of the oven or stove could prepare dinner for the family all by himself!
So is there any downside to Blue Apron? Well, with regard to the meal, the “sandwich” portion of the Seared Beef Sandwich turns out to be a 12” white bread bun: That’s an awful lot of white bread! I feel like possibly a whole wheat or multigrain bun would have been a healthier choice. Additionally, as the hubby will attest (because he takes out the garbage) the “delivery box” and the plastic and paper and just plain stuff they use to wrap everything in adds up to a whole lot of waste – a whole lot. One idea might be to use a returnable ice box (like remember when the milkman delivered the milk on your doorstep in those glass bottles?) for a small deposit so that millions of cardboard boxes don’t need to be made. Most everything comes in a neatly sealed plastic pouch – there’s gotta be a way to cut down on all that waste! Even the ice packs were like 4-5 plastic enclosed monster bags. Having said this, yes, they do have a recycling option, where you can send the whole deal back to the company.
So in the end, I would recommend Blue Apron! For the money, I got a great meal made with locally farmed, extremely fresh food. I learned stuff and I did things (not the way I would normally do) and in some small way, stretched my world! I feel like even though it wasn’t the way I would do things, now I have more in my culinary repertoire that I feel makes me a better cook! I don’t know that I would do this weekly (I think I’d go broke), but once in a while, it is good to get out of that rut and learn something new. A good thought to keep in mind for all aspects of life.
I was not compensated in any way by Blue Apron for this review, but I totally should have been! :D
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