Since this got bumped, I can add that I am getting the recipes now and have been archiving them. Haven’t made any yet, but some of them look good.
Since I’ve retired I’ve been looking through our cookbooks and selecting a recipe or two from each to make. I’ve done around 25 so far. That helps with variety. And we do menu planning and shopping once a week so getting a few meals in the mail wouldn’t make our lives much easier.
But it seems a good idea for those who are nervous about cooking.
I wonder which one the op ended up with if any …
Home Chef tended to have at least one or two very basic meat and veg, chicken dishes. So much so that I found them uninspiring when looking at the menu but they always tasted great once prepared.
We haven’t tried Blue Apron (too many friends and family have had quality issues with them), but we did try Home Chef for a few weeks. We ended up stopping because although it was tasty and easy to make, it wasn’t quite as tasty or as easy to make as the local service that had been using until they went out of business suddenly.
I hope no one minds me bumping a thread from a few months ago to add my two cents.
We’ve been doing Blue Apron for a couple of months (twice/week meal for four). Price-wise, it’s a luxury at $70/week - but the four of us can easily spend that much on a meal at a restaurant, and Blue Apron reduces the number of times we are tempted to eat out due to laziness or not having groceries on hand.
What I like about it:
[ul]
[li]Not having to come up with a menu or figure out what to make for dinner[/li][li]Having the right amount of the right ingredients every time[/li][li]Trying new things. This fall I cooked delicata squash and butternut squash for the first time. Last night our meal included barley and quick-pickled cabbage We’ve recently had kale and broccoli rabe and collard greens. These are not ingredients we normally buy on our own.[/li][li]The meals are healthy, and the serving sizes are appropriate (although I usually eat 1.5 servings while my 10 yr old daughter eats 1/2 serving). A meal typically runs 500 - 650 calories.[/li][li]Speaking of kids - our kids have always been pretty adventurous eaters, and this has introduced them to new foods they now like: Mediterranean spices, cod, new vegetables[/li][li]Every week we get two new recipes to add to our collection; after a year we could quit the service and still have 100 new recipes to make again whenever we want.[/li][li]Both my wife and I are decent cooks, but I’m still learning new techniques or food combinations by trying two new recipes every week.[/li][li]I love that the food is fresh, seasonal, and locally-sourced.[/li][/ul]
One thing we laugh about is that most recipes call for two or three cloves of garlic, but the box usually contains a full head of garlic. So one head will last for several meals, but you’re getting another whole head of garlic each time. We have about five heads of garlic sitting on our counter right now. Which is great - we just put more garlic in our meals, and have roasted garlic for snacking. And we’ve had no vampire problems at all!
ETA:
The only problem we ever had with Blue Apron was a shipment that included an avocado (for some shredded pork tacos - yum!). The avocado was very ripe, and got squashed by a, uh, squash, resulting in avocado smeared all over everything. My wife emailed Blue Apron about the problem and they gave her a nice credit on our next week’s meals, and we went out and picked up a new avocado at Publix.
Looks interesting. I went to the Blue Apron site and had to sign up to get any info. But I really don’t want 3 meals a week. Once a week or twice a month would be plenty to start with. I thought for sure you could modify that, but you can’t
I tend to cook big on weekends and we have it for dinner for at least a few days. The sameness doesn’t bother us at all, but we often run out.
Anyway, does anyone know of a company that is more customizable. Say I want 1 meal a week for 4 (so we have leftovers) delivered on Thursday.
I like the idea of what Blue Apron and others do; I like to cook things but if I don’t know whether I’ll like the result I don’t want to have a ton of stuff left over.
I just wish their ads on SiriusXM didn’t grate on me so.
I’ve been using Blue Apron for a few months as well. I really enjoy it. For one, that means my and the GF tend to cook at home more, which has got to be healthier for us, and also a bit cheaper (eating out generally will cost more than $10 a plate). And the best part is that everything is there in the right amounts - no wondering what to cook and then walking around a supermarket making sure you have everything for that plan. And there are a lot of interesting meals. I think last week there was a harissa chicken skewers meal that was quite tasty (and as adventurous as I am with eating, I don’t think I’ve had harissa before).
Yeah, I think your options with BA are three 2-serving meals or two 4-serving meals per week, although you can stop/restart the service on a week-to-week basis. So you could get the two bigger meals, then skip a week, then do it again. But you can probably find something that’s similar but with more flexibility.
We use The Fresh 20 for stretches of a time and then stop for awhile. Unlike Blue Apron, you have to do the shopping yourself. They do provide for 5 meals a week with 4 servings per meal. They have several options including “single” plans, vegetarian, etc. Each week you download the plan which includes a shopping list, nutritional information, prep guide, and of course each day’s recipe. Their thing is the shopping list has 20 fresh organic items per week. (I do the shopping and many times I skip on the organic version).
Like others have mentioned with Blue Apron it really pushed us into preparing and eating things we’d normally never make. I think when we started we went a full year doing The Fresh 20 and never had the same dinner twice in that year. The recipes are really good and are set-up to serve four. Typically that is roughly 1.5 servings for me, 1 serving for Mrs. MeanJoe, and I have the leftovers the next day for lunch.
I used Blue Apron for awhile, until I got too busy to do much in the way of cooking. Currently, I’ve signed up with Munchery, and order from them once or twice a week.
The Fresh 20 sounds like something I’d like to try, once I have time to cook again.
We started Blue Apron a month ago, we’ve been really liking it. Definitely trying new things or even variations on old things (like Butternut Squash with rice, which is going to become a new staple). There have been a couple of misses, but most have been great.
I definitely recommend checking out the comments on their recipes on their website before cooking. Some of it is just complaining about things, but there are some good notes (like a package of rice flour being way more than actually needed).
Hello Fresh was doing the same thing. I must’ve not been the only one pointing such out to them because they’re now making an effort to tell you either 1) they’ve given you more than what the recipe calls for, or 2) making sure, if the ingredient is perishable, that it’s used in the recipe more than one way (cheese, for example) so there’s no waste.
What drives me nuts is getting a particular ingredient I already have open and in the pantry, like white wine vinegar. I have 4-5 unopened baby bottles of that as well as shoyu, Dijon mustard, and something else which escapes my mind. I can’t blame the company because they don’t know whether the customer already has a particular ingredient, so I just collect 'em. I figure someday I’ll use them.
Yes! I don’t even remember which protein is was paired with for that meal, but that rice with the diced squash mixed in was delicious!
Also I’ve been cooking rice for years and I’ve mixed things into it but for some reason it never dawned on me that I could actually flavor rice while cooking it. I mean, duh, this is so obvious, but sautéing a little garlic and onion with salt & pepper in oil in the pot before adding the rice & water was an epiphany for me. I’m embarrassed to admit that.
I’ve been using Blue Apron for a couple of months, and it’s worked well for me. I like to cook, and am pretty handy in the kitchen, but having someone else do the food shopping and tell me what I’m going to cook is a big time-saver for me.
For us (trying to get in better shape), the portion sizes are often a bit too large, but that’s OK - I just take a recipe that makes two servings and divide it into three instead. One serving becomes lunch for my wife or me the next day.
I’ve been mostly impressed with the quality of the ingredients and the packaging. Occasionally they’ll put a too-viscous fluid in a little bottle instead of a tub (I think last time I noticed this it was oyster sauce), making it difficult to dispense, but that’s about the only complaint I can make.
Same here…at least for awhile. Then one day I had one large but lonely cubanelle pepper from the garden. Decided to dice it up and throw it in with the rice in the rice cooker just to keep from wasting it.
Damn that was some nice rice. A good cubanelle pepper has a wonderful “smokey” taste (though since then I have ran across plenty of low/no flavor dud cubanelles).
My wife and I have availed ourselves of several of those services’ promotional offers. I think we’ve done 5 by now- Hello Fresh, Marley Spoon and Blue Apron for sure, and two others I can’t recall.
They’re very simple recipes, and they give you, for the most part, premeasured amounts of relatively high quality ingredients. But you pay for that convenience, and in some cases, for premium ingredients you might otherwise downgrade. For example, the Marley Spoon meals had canned tomatoes included for a couple of the recipes. No problem there, but had it been my wife and I, we would have got store brand, or maybe Hunt’s/Contadina, not BioItalia organic San Marzano tomatoes.
On the whole, they’re very convenient, but the main takeaway is the recipe sheets, which have the measurements on them, so you can replicate the recipes if you want, and very few are using overly weird ingredients that you can’t sub for, or that are particularly hard to find.
We like them as an easy, tasty, healthy change of pace versus making a normal-sized batch of whatever it is, and then eating leftovers for a couple of nights. But we’re not so loaded that we can afford to just subsist on these meals either.
I’m with **kiz **in that it always feels strange and vaguely wasteful to open up a twee little bottle of some ingredient like vinegar, etc… when we have a big bottle in the pantry.
I’ve saved all my recipe sheets. I like the fact that Hello Fresh includes all the recipes from a particular week, not just the ones I ordered. One of those “other” recipes is very similar to a dish I occasionally make myself, LOL.
I order maybe twice a month at the most. Their advantage for me is convenience in that it takes away the “what do I want for dinner” issue. Plus it makes enough for another meal if I don’t feel like cooking.
that should help