Blue Apron, How I Love Thee!

In my last post, I mentioned how Blue Apron saved us during our first week of daycare.  You're probably thinking that I'm nuts...and while I might be, let me explain what typically happens each week in our house.  On the weekends, Chad will ask me to decide upon some meals for the week.  This should be easy, right?  Maybe if I was a clone of Chad it would be.  He doesn't typically care what we eat each evening, but I, on the other hand, usually care very much.  He could have the same few meals every week, but not me.  I like VARIETY!  Unfortunately, this means coming up with the meals, which I despise.  I love to cook & look at recipes, but only when I want to.  I have HAVING to do so.  So needless to say, it's a struggle most weekends.  

I had been toying with the idea of a meal delivery service for sometime now but never took the plunge.  I have no idea why other than I just didn't.  I guess I was a bit apprehensive about spending the money and not liking it, but I'll typically try anything once.  So I ran across someone that had a week's free of meals to give away.  I couldn't turn it down.  Fate, right?!?!

The service has two options: the 2-Person Plan or the Family Plan.  We opted for the 2-Person plan which gives you 3 different meals for 2 persons every week.  You can cancel your subscription, skip weeks and/or change meals at any time without penalty.  Very cool if you only want deliveries less than weekly.  You just have to go in by Wednesday before the shipment and let them know if you want to skip a week or change a meal.  

So last Saturday our shipment arrived, and I couldn't have been more excited!  It just happened to coincide with the first week of daycare also.  I hadn't planned it that way, but boy did it work out in our favor.

It was so much fun to unpack the box with all the fresh ingredients...all labeled so nicely and measured to the perfect amount.

(Disclaimer...the picture above is from the 2nd shipment.  I failed to take this shot of the first shipment.  So you'll see different ingredients above than what our recipes called for in the first week.)

Each box also comes with a large, colored recipe card.  It's has a nice pic of the finished version on the front with several step-by-step pics on the back to guide you along the way.  Each recipe that we made last week was super easy and fast.  We didn't even have to think about dinner other than which of the 3 recipes to make.  This was soon helpful when you have an overtired, screaming infant!  If we didn't have Blue Apron last week, I'm quite sure it would have been take out most nights.  Yikes!

The first recipe was the Apple & Blue Cheese Panzanella Salad.  This was probably our least favorite of the 3, but it was still quite good and super easy to make.

The second recipe was the Seared Salmon & Salsa Verde...our favorite of the week.  The nice thing about this service is that you have this wonderful recipe card if you want to purchase the ingredients to make the recipe again.

The final recipe of the week was Cacciatore-Style Baked Eggs.  I totally failed to take a shot of the prepared meal, but it looks much like the recipe card.

We loved Blue Apron so much that we opted for another delivery this week.  Stay tuned!

Cheers!