If you don't know what Blue Apron is, let me share. It's a weekly service that delivers two unprepared meals to your door. The dry ice packed boxes are filled with carefully selected, fresh, measured and labeled ingredients and an instruction sheet. You do the prep work, learn how to cook and have creatively delicious meals to show for it. The menus are limited but when you sign up you take a survey to help guide your selections. If you remember, you can go onto the site and choose two options from the 3-5 they're offering that week. The service runs about $60 a week which breaks down to about $15 per 2 person meal. Selections often include options like salmon with quinoa or steak with vegetables and rice. Dietary restricted options are always available as well.
I've been seeing a lot of the commercials and it really seemed like a good idea. I had a bit of a hard time with the price because it's half the weekly household grocery budget. But I LOVED the idea of having fresh, new-to-me menus and easy to follow instructions delivered to my door. So, when my mom offered, I had to take her up on it.
My first option this week is Italian Wedding Soup. It's cute, on the instruction card they give you a little background about into the dish. According to Blue Apron, the Italian Wedding Soup is named after its debut appearance in Italian weddings and the marriage of both meat and leafy greens in the dish.
For the dish, they give you all the ingredients unprepared, instructions and a 25-30 minute cook time. Well, that went out the window pretty quick. It took almost an hour for my to finish. Maybe they based their times off more experienced chefs. But I had to dice a carrot, celery stalk, medium onion, garlic clove and 2 cups of spinach. Then I was instructed to hand make my chicken meatballs. They didn't look like the recipe....
After all was prepped, they had me sauté the vegetables, add water with a gel bouillon and drop in the pasta with balls. It told me to only boil for 5-6 minutes which I did before dropping in the spinach.
All seemed pretty typical go me. I watched the clock and landed about an hour before I was ready to serve. As you can see; Blue Apron versus mine. Looks like a Pintrest fail! 😝
But don't judge a book by its cover unless that book's pasta is way too al dente and has no flavor. It was officially a fail. Even if I didn't have to cook a second dinner (I ended up making D pork tenderloin) there really was not enough to fill my pregnant self and Big D before bed.
So, Round 1 was kind of a foodie bust. But I'll give it another try. I did however leave this experience with a knowledge of how to make Italian Wedding Soup. Plus, this was the first time I've ever made a meatball cooked in liquid and I felt really good about that. Meatballs have NOT been a forte of mine in the past and this did give me the motivation to try again.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm a bit on the fence about Blue Apron. However, if I see menu options in the future that would suit my family's needs I'll definitely try it again. If not for anything but the experience and education alone!
Thank you Mom & Dad for the trial!!!
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