Our fourth Blue Apron delivery is arriving today and we couldn't be more excited. We were apprehensive prior to our first shipment, but now we're convinced that Blue Apron is an excellent fit for our lives.
Blue Apron delivers a box to our home once a week. It's lined with a freezer bag and ice-packs, three easy to follow recipe cards, and all of the ingredients to make those meals. We can choose our meals ahead of time on the website or on the iPhone app (not yet on Android) and have an option to have wine pairings shipped also. We can preview upcoming menus, change them or skip them entirely. Furthermore, we can select certain dietary preferences (such as vegetarian, pescatarian, pork free or no red meat) and day preference for delivery. There's no sign up fee and we can cancel at any time.
What we love best about Blue Apron is that it exposes us to new recipes for home cooking. We usually get in a rut of cooking the same thing. Our weekly rotation was fine: salmon on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, chicken on Wednesdays, etc., but now we have three days of learning new dishes. We get to keep the recipes from Blue Apron and use them again on our own. We've been exposed to new ideas for meatballs (try adding raisins!) and different kinds of pasta (who knew that Bucatini was so magical?).
Also, one of the tedious aspects of trying a new recipe is gathering all of the ingredients and measuring them out. Blue Apron has that set for you. It's all proportioned and labeled – even seasoning packets, pats of butter, teeny containers of hot sauce, and pre-measured tubs of miso paste. The recipe cards have pictures for each step and are excellent in walking you through multitasking. I would rarely try a new recipe after work but now it's a lot of fun because the challenging parts are done for me.
The price of Blue Apron is reasonable. It's $20 per meal for two people (including shipping) so $60 each week (total with shipping). Our first shipment of three meals was free but we had to pay $30 for shipping.
I appreciate that Blue Apron cares about recycling and makes it easy to recycle at home. Unfortunately, certain things are not easily recycled in the City of Chicago (ahem: plastic bags) so Blue Apron has an option to send the recyclables (and our own) back to them in their shipping box for free! They'll reuse the ice-packs and recycle those pesky plastic bags.
My only complaint about Blue Apron is that I'm not always sure about the ingredients they choose. We're super into non-GMO, organic, hormone-free, grass-fed, cage-free, yadda yadda and I wish the ingredients were more clear about those characteristics. I even called Blue Apron (and quickly spoke to a live person) and she wasn't sure. That ambiguity made us so uneasy that we almost walked away from Blue Apron even before the first shipment arrived! But… it was already on it's way and we couldn't let it go to waste… then we were hooked.
Our fourth Blue Apron delivery is arriving today and we couldn't be more excited. We were apprehensive prior to our first shipment, but now we're convinced that Blue Apron is an excellent fit for our lives.
Blue Apron delivers a box to our home once a week. It's lined with a freezer bag and ice-packs, three easy to follow recipe cards, and all of the ingredients to make those meals. We can choose our meals ahead of time on the website or on the iPhone app (not yet on Android) and have an option to have wine pairings shipped also. We can preview upcoming menus, change them or skip them entirely. Furthermore, we can select certain dietary preferences (such as vegetarian, pescatarian, pork free or no red meat) and day preference for delivery. There's no sign up fee and we can cancel at any time.
What we love best about Blue Apron is that it exposes us to new recipes for home cooking. We usually get in a rut of cooking the same thing. Our weekly rotation was fine: salmon on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, chicken on Wednesdays, etc., but now we have three days of learning new dishes. We get to keep the recipes from Blue Apron and use them again on our own. We've been exposed to new ideas for meatballs (try adding raisins!) and different kinds of pasta (who knew that Bucatini was so magical?).
Also, one of the tedious aspects of trying a new recipe is gathering all of the ingredients and measuring them out. Blue Apron has that set for you. It's all proportioned and labeled – even seasoning packets, pats of butter, teeny containers of hot sauce, and pre-measured tubs of miso paste. The recipe cards have pictures for each step and are excellent in walking you through multitasking. I would rarely try a new recipe after work but now it's a lot of fun because the challenging parts are done for me.
The price of Blue Apron is reasonable. It's $20 per meal for two people (including shipping) so $60 each week (total with shipping). Our first shipment of three meals was free but we had to pay $30 for shipping.
I appreciate that Blue Apron cares about recycling and makes it easy to recycle at home. Unfortunately, certain things are not easily recycled in the City of Chicago (ahem: plastic bags) so Blue Apron has an option to send the recyclables (and our own) back to them in their shipping box for free! They'll reuse the ice-packs and recycle those pesky plastic bags.
My only complaint about Blue Apron is that I'm not always sure about the ingredients they choose. We're super into non-GMO, organic, hormone-free, grass-fed, cage-free, yadda yadda and I wish the ingredients were more clear about those characteristics. I even called Blue Apron (and quickly spoke to a live person) and she wasn't sure. That ambiguity made us so uneasy that we almost walked away from Blue Apron even before the first shipment arrived! But… it was already on it's way and we couldn't let it go to waste… then we were hooked.