Blue Apron

This is another product review, but of course I don't have any sponsors or paid posts on this blog. Just my own opinions about products I like. 

I really like food delivery subscriptions. There are many services now, and they all work the same way, delivering a box of meal ingredients to your door, and are all probably about the same. 

My son uses Blue Apron, which I got him for Christmas one year. This year we got my stepdaughter and her husband a meal kit service called Every Plate.

My son lives in Denver in the city. He's single. Food shopping isn't very convenient in the city and buying for one is incredibly wasteful no matter how hard you try to use leftovers. He didn't cook, and was living on burritos and restaurant delivery.

Blue Apron is tailored to the newbie cook, and in the time he's been getting weekly deliveries he has really learned the basics of meal prep. He gets two meals a week with a step by step recipe card, which he follows exactly, no winging it. There are pictures of every ingredient for cooks who don't know what most of these things look like!

Meals are for two people, so he splits the two-person servings into four dinners a week, eating half of each meal one night and the remaining half another night. Four dinner meals per week.

He selects his menus online each week, and has had fun experimenting with tastes and new-to-him dishes. When we visit him at his place he cooks for us and the meals have been excellent.

What I love are the tiny portions for each recipe: if you need a special fontina cheese, you get just the tiny sprinkling needed for the recipe. You don't have to send a single guy to the grocery to buy too much and then let it sit in his refrigerator for a year. When the recipe is cooked, there are no ingredients left over to "do something with".

That means every recipe is zhuzhed up with fancy toppings or ingredients that absolutely make the dish. The steps are basic but the additions are things a single man would never have on hand and it makes a difference. 

He made pizza rustica with hand-stretched yeast dough and caramelized pickled onions for a date recently and she was mightily impressed. Wow.

He's not always at home for delivery. He spends time in the mountains or away, so he often pauses delivery until the next week and that's been easy to do online. 

When I got him the subscription initially I thought he'd be intrigued for a few weeks, then slide back to canned soup and restaurant take out. But he hasn't. He's stayed with it, learned the basics (Mom, you always sautée the onions and garlic in oil first, then chop the vegetables. Every recipe.) 

The packaging is an issue. Every week there's a lot of cardboard and wrappings to recycle or dispose of.

But he's eating well, getting the calories to fuel long bike rides up steep mountains, and getting the satisfaction of preparing something delicious and appealing with expertise. Impressing romantic guests is a plus.

It's around $50 a week for the two person / twice a week plan he gets, depending on what he selects. That's four meals for him (unless he has someone over to impress). $12.50 per meal. Expensive, but he's not buying and storing ingredients he doesn't need and won't use, or throwing away uneaten leftovers. And he eats way better.