Blue Apron (http://www.blueapron.com)
Far later in life than I should have I decided to try to liberate myself from needing other people feed me, that is, prepare my food for me, whether personally or through the pay-as-you-go food infrastructure of our society, which notoriously tends to be expensive and/or not healthy.
The move was prompted by some changes in my life corresponding to the debut of Blue Apron, and it became the keystone of my strategy in learning how to cook decently. I figured it would reduce the barriers-to-entry, make cooking entire meals with good ingredients more accessible, and hopefully, eventually, be a stepping stone away from dependence on their service as well.
It’s worked… I’ve gone from not being able to cook much at all to being pretty decent at it, and I don’t plan to stop there.
Here’s the deal: there are variations for more people, but basically you subscribe to the service, they deliver a box once a week that contains the makings for three meals for two people each, or six meals total for just under $60, call it $10 per person/meal. Their covenant with their customers is to supply every ingredient needed, in the box, other than salt, pepper, oil and water, and they are serious about it and very good at that. If they say it needs a few ounces of milk, the box includes a few ounces of milk. It includes any spices other than pepper. If they say it needs a pat of butter, there is a pat of butter. If they say two tablespoons of sesame oil, there is a tiny bottle with two tablespoons of sesame oil. Everything is per-measured with the rare exception of some produce item, in which case they may warn you that you may have too much.
After a year I can say that the ingredients have been almost always very high quality, fresh and complete. There is only once I can recall that an ingredient was actually missing (there were more “false alarms” that turned out to be user error), an avocado. No big deal, I just made another dish that night and put it on the grocery list. Once in a year is not bad. There have been a couple of times that the beef, usually very good, was a little gristly, and a couple of times when the salmon did not seem as fresh as one would hope- one of the household is VERY sensitive about that, so it’s been a problem… but the next time it was fine again.
The recipes are usually very good, although sometimes they do feel a little too much alike over long periods of time. There is much more reliance on pan frying and sauteing than on any other method of cooking, though they do call for boiling rice and potatoes fairly often, and once in a while something goes into the oven.
Over the past year I’ve collected, extracted and modified the individual component recipes that have gone over well and made those from scratch. At that point, obviously, there’s no difference in what you’re doing and just working with a cookbook, other than your first exposure to it. Still, if it weren’t for Blue Apron there are a lot of successful dishes I probably wouldn’t have tried on my own, like arepas, which I now consider important.
You can cancel at any time, there is no contract and no penalty, but you can also cancel individual shipments from a few weeks ahead of time until noon of the day AFTER you box arrives, for the following week. They do need that six day’s notice.
At this writing I’m slowly gaining more independence from the service and canceling more and more shipments, but I’m not ready to cancel the service entirely yet, I don’t think. I’ve got a pretty good foundation of experience, but they still introduce items from time to time that I don’t think I would have tried on my own, and that has value.
All in all, recommended, if you have the interest.
– Robert the Wombat