Dan, my wife signed us up for Blue Apron a while back. At first it was a
kind of adventure and we looked forward to it bringing a little variety
to our meals. None of us are really inspired when it comes to meals we
have to cook ourselves. We're busy people who lean toward food as a
necessary duty rather than as a creative expression and we tend to fall
back on habit, to cooking the same few dishes.
It should also be noted that we are not equipped with many kitchen
skills either, so the cheery estimates regarding the time it would take
to prep, provided by Blue Apron, had to be inflated greatly to
compensate for the relatively long times it took us to get through all
the steps. It should also be noted that when I write "we," you can
assume it means "me," because I work at home and have, apparently, a
whole lot of free time.
We began with three meals a week, I think, or was it four? I don't
recall. All I know is that my kitchen became a sort of exotic foods
warehouse two or three times a week, with deliveries and distribution
taking precedence over all else in my day before I ever began the tasks
required to combine the ingredients into a finished meal. And speaking
of ingredients, Blue Apron has exploded in the field of meal delivery,
so much so that they were cranking out boxes of stuff at an alarming
rate to meet demand, so frequently they'd screw up and leave out some
small but pivotal ingredient, forcing us to search through everything
multiple times in a futile attempt to locate said ingredient and to try
to mimic its effect on the meal with whatever we had on hand.
To be fair, the meals were typically very good, if a little redundant,
and paid off the effort for the most part. There were some duds, of
course, but more often they'd satisfy us.
I should mention the squash. I am not and have never been a squash guy,
and it seemed that every meal was curiously squash-centric after a
while, and had such breezily benign instructions as, "peel and chop the
squash into one inch cubes." I don't know how much you've worked with
squashes, but most of them are roughly the consistency of diamonds, and
peeling one takes engineering and tools I do not have at my disposal.
Finally what killed it for us (me) was neither the stress of attempting
to replicate the perfection of the included photos, or even the squash.
It was the time investment. I had to block out hours of my day to prep
and lash together a meal that lasted at most fifteen minutes before we
had to be somewhere else. The responses were generally positive, though.
Is summary, we tried it and it was fun for a bit, but it eventually wore
thin and we went back to what we do best, which is to throw together
something out of a panicked assessment of the pantry and a silent vow to
upgrade our available choices next time.
I dunno, though. You may like it.
On 4/2/17 10:16 AM, Daniel J. Matyola wrote:
Does anyone use Blue Apron, or one of the competing food services?
I'd be curious to hear what folks like or don't like about this ttype of
delivery service.
Dan Matyola
http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/danieljmatyola
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