Blue Apron's Meal in a Box

Yesterday, our first Blue Apron box arrived and we made a delicious meal of catfish fillets, red cabbage slaw, and rice. All the ingredients are premeasured and the directions are simple, so we had a nice meal ready to eat in just under 1/2 hour. When I was at my daughter's home last year, she ordered a trial of meal-in-a-box for me to prepare dinner for the 3 of us, and I really enjoyed it then, so decided to try it for Y and me and see how it goes.

We've been in a rut, with me eating badly as I always do and Y fixing huge pots full of various ingredients from the Chinese grocery store. I'm always foraging for something to eat, while Y has a 'fridge full of left-overs. One day last week I went on a rampage and threw out all the dishes filled with leftover this 'n that clogging up the fridge, but I doubt that Y even knew I had thrown out all his precious "next meal" pots of various food items. My goal is to fix a meal, eat all of it, and avoid the damned left-over part of the food process.

I told him we're going to try Blue Apron for a month and see how it goes. We get 3 meals a week and all we have to do is assemble them. The meals are ones we usually wouldn't prepare, so it's an adventure to both see what's in the box and then do the prep. The ingredients are portioned for two diners, so there aren't leftovers to have to decide whether to keep or throw away. I hate wasting food, so it's nice not to have that aspect of the dining experience. And it's a nice "team building" activity if we cook together, which we did last night. I think Y enjoyed the process as much as I did -- and he even volunteered to do the dishes!

As I explained to Y, it doesn't cost any more than dining out at a reasonable restaurant, and everything is fresh and cooked to our time table, so it's a win-win. We're going to use it for a month to give the process a good fair try-out, and then we're going to China so have to stop the service. If we really like doing this, we'll take it back up when we're back from China as it's not that expensive and it's a nice activity for us to do together.