Bye Bye, Blue

Well, the big thing that happened today was that I canceled our account with Blue Apron.

We've been getting the familiar Blue Apron box since December of 2015.  I may be mistaken, but I think Blue Apron was the first of the services which delivers food to your home, along with recipes and all you have to do is cook it.

I had seen ads for it and it sounded intriguing, especially since I was getting so tired of meal planning.  I had come down to a rotating list of three or four things that I cooked each week because I had lost the interest in being creative.

But Laurel and Tom, who had just started taking Blue Apron, offered to give us a free week for a Christmas present and I decided what the heck.

I figured we'd take the free week and then cancel right away, but in order to get the free week, you have to give them your credit card and before the free meal arrives, your card has already been charged for the next week.

But that was OK.  We'd have two weeks before we cancelled.  The first box arrived and I loved how things were packaged and the laminated cards that showed step by step instructions for cooking them.

 

Only the problem was that the food was so good!  On our second week we had Harissa Lamb & Beef Burgers, Roast chicken with potato latkes, and tamarind glazed cod.

Right away I figured that I would be cooking things i had never cooked before and using spices and sauces that I'd never heard of before.  We also would be eating more vegetables than I normally cook, and also having fish once a week.

When I calculated the cost, I decided that Blue Apron was cheaper (and healthier) than going to the store each week....plus, I've reached a point in my old age where I can't eat a big meal at night any more so more often than not there would be enough left over...and (a) I would not have to go the store as often and (b) that would reduce impulse purchases.

Given all that, we decided to keep Blue Apron for awhile and I have been very pleased with our boxes.  We have only had one or two problems (once the carrier didn't deliver it until a day late and I was concerned that the food might have spoiled as the ice it comes in had melted).  They were very gracious and comped the next week (and as it turned out, I did cook the "spoiled" food anyway, and it was all just fine).

Since the success of Blue Apron, similar services are popping up all over the place.  You see them all the time on Facebook. There are a couple, like Hello Fresh, Home Chef and Plated which are like Blue Apron, one is based on the Paleo diet, there is even one which will deliver a week's worth of snacks, if you want.

My friend John Fitzgerald, himself a gourmet cook, decided to try Blue Apron on my recommendation and he, too, loved it.  Bit he recently switched to Home Chef and when I asked him the difference he said "we liked Blue Apron, but i love Home Chef." I decided to check it out.

I immediately was intrigued.  I loved the fact that I could pick my own meals each week and, rather than the six that Blue Apron offers for choice, I could choose from among 13 different meals.  Blue Apron has a lot of "exotic" meals, which has been nice, but, quite frankly, the "good old meals" like steak and potatoes offered by Home Chef looked appealing.

I checked an on line web site which compared the two and found this:

Home Chef would win our “all-around” award. We really liked it. The meals were simple but flavorful. I learned a few new techniques preparing them, but didn’t roll my eyes at extraneous steps like I often did with Blue Apron.

She also wrote

Plated and Blue Apron will appeal to you if you want to try exotic flavors and unusual combinations. These meals include ingredients you won’t find at your local supermarket. That can be fun, but makes the meals hard to recreate. We found meals from these two companies were the most involved to prepare, but also the most interesting to eat.

So I decided to end my Blue Apron subscription and start one with Home Chef.  The cost is the same, but the choices are different and they even offer "premium" meals now and then for special occasions (for $10 more, for example, you can order filet mignon on Father's Day).  

So we have one more Blue Apron box to be delivered this week and then we start a new adventure with Home Chef and see how we like that one.  I still won't have to go to the store and it will still save me money and we will still be eating more healthy foods, but I probably won't be dealing as much with things like tamarind concentrate, Kedgeree spice blend  or Sambal Oelek for awhile.

I can hardly wait to try the brown butter shrimp with smoked gouda grits I ordered for a couple of weeks from now....

Day One

Well, it is clear that this new program of mine is going to require patience.

Happy that we had a Plan (though it meant I would not be able to do the stuff I had to do at home), I went off at 11.  We were going to buy lipstick.  I would take her to Panda Express for lunch and then we'd go back to Atria and either go to Bingo or work puzzles.

She had something to do today!

Only she was still in bed asleep when I got there.

Well...OK.  I had given all day to this enterprise.  No need to wake her up when I have a book in my purse.

I sat down to read and eventually I fell asleep in the chair, waking when one of her care givers came to take her to lunch.  It was 12:30.

She got up slowly, body creaking and feeling out of sorts.  She tried saying that she didn't know what she was supposed to be doing but I had an answer for that one.  We had, by that time, however, decided that she didn't feel well enough to go shopping.  I told her that since she didn't fell well, we could put off doing that job until tomorrow, so she has a plan for tomorrow too.

I got coffee for her and we talked for awhile until her head cleared.  An interesting thing happened at the lobby coffee pot.  A woman was just finishing up her coffee when I came and she looked at me and said "Are you the one who writes the reviews for the paper?"  Now how in the world she knew that I don't have a clue, since my photo has never appeared with my reviews.  But it was kind of fun to be recognized.

Raquel had brought a walker in to the apartment.  Apparently she will now use it to go to meals, if it is in her room, but then she leaves it in the dining room.  She doesn't know what it is or who it belongs to, but she's not as negative about it as she once was.

Since we weren't going out, I decided to go to lunch at Atria, though I really am tired of Atria meals.  We walked slowly to the dining room (no walker) and had a nice lunch, though we were joined by a woman who has been at Atria for about 8 months.  She says she likes to sit with different people each time so she can find out about where they come from.

She then proceeded to tell me her whole life story from childhood to today, the farm on which she lived, her family, her job (a teacher), the book she's writing, that she had not felt well this morning and had gone to the doctor (she had meds she picked up that she couldn't open and I opened the bottle for her).  She talked the whole time we were there and didn't ask my mother a single question.  She is also the first person I met who refers to herself by her last name.  I only know her as Mrs. D.....

We went back to the apartment and I told her that I had to go home to get some work done.  It was 2 p.m. now, and Bingo was over anyway.  But I told her I'd come back tomorrow and we'd see about going out tomorrow.

I came home and started to work on the reviews, but fell asleep for about 2 hours.  I'm starting to think this dementia thing is starting to make me depressed because I've been sleeping so much.  It seems whenever I sit down to do anything, from work to play, I have to get up and go take a nap. I'm getting as bad as my mother.

But Wednesday is the meeting day for the Dementia Support Group.  They meet the 3rd Wednesday of the month and for many months now I have had conflicting activities, but I realize I really need support, encouragement and suggestions from the group this time.

I love my mother but I never dreamed that when we started paying about $1,000 a month extra for assisted living that it would increase the time I needed to spend with her!

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I'm also taking a couple of weeks off from Blue Apron.  I love the meals, I love not having to plan, and about 90% of what we get is delicious and the things that I don't particularly like, Walt does, so it has worked out exceptionally well.

But mis en place is killing me!  Tom says he loves having all of his ingredients measured and chopped before he starts cooking.  I've always been a "search frantically in the fridge before it's time to add the next ingredient" kind of cook, and while I agree completely that mis en place makes your life easier, I'd just like to take a couple of weeks off.  All that chopping before cooking kills my back and I end up having to take a few minutes off about 3-4 times during a meal, so with a couple of weeks of having to plan my own meals again, I will be happy to go back to getting those little boxes every week -- and besides, part of that will be Thanksgiving anyway.  

I've decided to cook a small turkey and see if I can encourage my mother to come over here. I could have a turkey dinner with her at Atria, but then I'd have no leftovers, the last time Atria served no dressing, and I don't like their pumpkin pie (and wouldn't have any left for breakfast in the morning).  So that's another good reason to postpone Blue Apron for that week, at least.

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I've been seeing a log=t of people on line indignant when they are called racists or homophobes or xenophobes just because they voted for Trump.  They see themselves as the good guys and not like those disruptive people.  What was it the Pharisee said? "‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—crooks, evildoers, adulterers"

But they knew what Trump was.  They listened to his comments about women, his threats about ethnic groups, his plans for disrupting people's lives and all sorts of other things, including encouraging violence at his rallies ("throw him out in the cold."), and I have to ask, if you are really a good person, how could you vote for a person who espouses those hateful sentiments?

Is this the man you want to show your children as a person they can emulate?

One of his first cabinet appointments has been Steve Bannon as chief strategist  Breitbart, the website Bannon ran "is a home for the White Nationalist Right that elevates racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic tirades and conspiracy theories.”  His appointment has drawn criticism from the left and from the right.

Oh we are going to have a lot of settling in days ahead of us, my friends.  And it ain't gonna be pretty.

Never Too Old to Learn

I watch a lot of the Food Network lately.  Heck, even Walt can recognize several of the chefs now.  I am particularly impressed, and somewhat intimidated by, the contestants in the children's competitions.  Those kids know more at age 10 or 11 than I know at age 73.  The little kids are teaching me terminology and techniques that I should have known for years.

The Food Network, combined with our Blue Apron subscription, which I am liking more and more, are both teaching me cooking skills I should have had years ago.  Who knew that a simple thing like waiting for oil to be HOT before adding meat, fish or chicken would significantly improve the final product?

Blue Apron is also getting me into the habit of creating a mis en place, getting all ingredients chopped, measured, and in individual bowls before starting to cook.  I was always the one unwrapping the meat while the chopped onions were turning too brown in the pan, or frantically searching for a measuring cup or spoon while the food in the pan overcooks.  Now I use lots of little bowls for the pre-chopped ingredients and the cooking goes more smoothly.

After all these years, I finally know how best to cook a slab of beef or piece of chicken and have it turn out the way I want...and not stick to the pan when I try to turn it.'

Thanks to Blue Apron, I have eaten more kale, chard and collard greens than ever in my life.  I'm still not going to make a kale salad or replace lettuce in a sandwich with kale, but when mixed in with other ingredients and cooked, I hardly even know it's there.  Last night's kale with purple potatoes, onion and apple was delicious.  (I will admit to still pushing aside beets though; I do have some standards to maintain.  That's OK.  Walt tolerates the onions I put in the recipes and patiently removes them all before eating)

Prior to Blue Apron, I never cooked fish and only occasionally splurged and bought a crab.  It's not that I don't like fish, but the prices just put me off.  I would buy cheap hamburger instead.  Now we are eating fish once a week, in all sorts of ways (this week it will be cod tacos -- for Cinco de Mayo, I guess)

We’re wrapping corn tortillas around pan-fried cod, alongside creamy avocado, crisp radish and a delicious element that fish tacos picked up along the California coast: crunchy cabbage slaw. Our gorgeous slaw is infused with the smoky, robust heat of a chipotle pepper in adobo sauce (or a dried jalapeño marinated in a sauce typically made with tomatoes, herbs, spices and vinegar).

Blue Apron has introduced us to dozens of new recipes like Yuzu-Shoyu Soba with cabbage and Togarashi (a Japanese dish with soba noodles) or Za'atar Chicken and Pearl Couscous (an Israeli pasta dish).  I've learned that when they include a special spice packet and it warns "use as much of the spice blend as you'd like, depending on how spicy you'd like the dish to be," I should only use half the package, because the full package is MUCH more spicy than I would like to eat.

In the past, the starch on my plate has been rice, potatoes, or pasta.  Now I've added things like sweet potato, cracked freekeh ("an ancient grain with a deliciously nutty taste"), couscous (not the instant kind I buy at the supermarket) and faro (a mixture of grains of certain wheat species).

And plantains!  My goodness....plantains!  Where have they been all my life?  Oh, I knew them, of course.  Even ate them a few times when visiting my friend Melody, whose significant other was from Nigeria.  But now I've had them fried and discovered that mashed they are a great potato substitute.  In fact, thanks to The Food Network, I'm making something called an "enchilasagna" for Cinco de Mayo tomorrow.  It is a quasi lasagna made with layers of corn tortillas fried in coconut oil and layered with salsa, cheese, and fried plantains.  It will either be delicious, or we'll send out for pizza.

I like that Blue Apron includes a card called "from the farm" which either gives you information about a specific ingredient in your parcel, or tells you something about the local farm from whence it comes.

For so long I have been so incredibly bored planning and fixing the same thing night after night, but watching Food Network and cooking Blue Apron meals have given me a new lease on my cooking life.  I even used a $100 Amazon gift certificate recently to buy a top of the line frying pan.  I've always gotten the cheap kind and replaced it with another cheap one when it began to wear out, and I have discovered that you get what you pay for.  This new pan is like night and day from what I have been using for years.

I won't say I wouldn't like to go out for dinner every night instead of cooking, but at least I'm now enjoying both cooking and definitely the finished product more than I have for many years.

A Two Baby Day

The population of Davis increased by 2 yesterday.  I love sitting at the Inforation Desk and hearing the music box-like sound of Brahms' Lullaby playing softly over the loudspeaker to let the hospital know that a new baby has just been born.  Though these days, I don't know whether to feel happy or sad about the new little arrival, wondeering what kind of world he/she is entering.

The day started with the four of us (Jeri and Alice were here overnight) sitting around eating cranberry muffins and chatting.  Then Alice got her stuff together and took off for a lunch with a friend in Sacramento.  She would then be starting her trip back to Santa Barbara, so this was goodbye.

Jeri borrowed Walt's bike to go to Atria for lunch with my mother and then spent the afternoon biking around Davis to see if it had changed much since her last time here (it hadn't).

Walt took me out to Sutter where I learned that I had an assistant for the day.  Her name was Beloved and I'm not really sure what she was doing there--it's not like the Information Desk is a 2-person job!  But she told me that she had injured her arm and that she was just filling in in various slots around the hospital while she was healing.

As it turned out, it was kind of a busy day and it was nice to have her to run off to deliver flowers, and guide people to where they were supposed to be for various reasons.  We didn't chat much.  She had brought a book of "find a word" puzzles and spent most of her time working those while I finished my book (Doris Kearns Goodman's "Wait Till Next Year.")

At 4:30, Walt came to pick me up and we came home to sit for a bit before time to go out for Family Movie Night.  We try to go to a movie whenever Jeri is here, even though there was slim pickings right now.  Too many CGI-laden shoot-'em-up adventure movies.  Walt suggested Zootopia, which he wanted to see, but Jeri was lukewarm on it.  She preferred Spotlight, which I had seen but the other two had not.  I said I wouldn't mind seeing it again, so Spotlight it was.  Somehow it had a greater impact on the big screen, bringing back anew the shock of size and scope of the Cathaolic church cover-up of pedophile priests.

When I tried to check out how many exactly it was, I found this:

The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.

What still galls me the most is that Cardinal Law, who orchestrated secret settlements for abuse claims made against at least seventy of his priests, in which families were paid to stay silent about the molestation and rape of their children, was appointed by John Paul II as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the most prestigious churches in Rome, in 2004.

I'm glad that the Boston Globe shone a light on this scandal and set the stage for world-wide investigation of cases of molestation of children. But what a grievous sin that without the work of the team in Boston, this might have gone on forever with the Church continuing to cover it up and move pedophile priests to new parishes with new children to molest.

It was after 8:30 when we got home.  Walt fixed Jeri a "Dark and Stormy" while I got together one of our Blue Apron dinners, a Cuban Pork sandwich with a salad made of kale and fried plantains.

Jeri was so thrilled to see me fixing something with kale that she felt it deserved a photo!

When we first decided to try Blue Apron, my fear had been that the meals might not be large enough to feed us, but I have found that to be far from the case.  I can rarely finish my portion and last night there was enough for the 3 of us, with leftovers.

It was after 10 by the time we finished dinner and time for everyone to go to sleep.  Jeri is leaving today after she and I have lunch with my mother, then life gets back to whatever "normal" is around here, but it sure has been nice to have her home again, however briefly.

A Full Day

I was up until 3 a.m. this morning reading our next book club selection, "A Gravity of Birds." Char finished it two days ago and said it was wonderful.  I had a difficult time getting into it at first, but once I got into the whole story, I couldn't put it down.  I finally did at 3 a.m., but then slept for 2 hours, woke up and went back to reading, finishing it by 8 a.m.  Char was right...it was a great book.  Even if the story hadn't been so good, the author's (Tracy Guzeman) writing was so wonderful that kept me reading.  

Sadly, I realized that I can't make it to the book club meeting on the 19th after all...Walt has the car for his dental appointment in Berkeley, I have a lunch date with my former co-worker, followed by working at the hospital.  I'm really sorry.  This is another book I would very much like to discuss with the group.

Around 11:30, we went to the home of our friend Nancianne for a delightful brunch.  There were supposed to be four of us guests, but the other two had to back out for health reasons, so it was just the three of us.  Nancianne was the heart an soul of the Davis Comic Opera Company throughout its 30 year history and so she is a dyed in the wool theater person and we had a good time comparing shows, companies, and people we have known in theater throughout the years.

Plus the meal was delicious, finished off with various types of chocolates.  It was enough to make you want to lie down and take a nap.

So I did.  I knew I had a show to review tonight, so I came home, climbed into the recliner and went to sleep almost immediately (I was going on about 2-3 hours sleep, after all!).  At 5, I woke up, looked outside, saw the sky was just barely light, looked at the clock and thought, in a panic, that I had slept through the night and forgotten to review a show.  Then I realized it was 5 Pm not 5 Am and all was OK.  But I was well rested, for sure.

Neither Walt nor I felt like eating dinner, as we were still full from brunch, so we went off to pick up my colleague, Jeff, with whom we often drive to Sacramento shows.

The show was Driving Miss Daisy with the incomparable Janis Stevens.  I first saw her in a show called Master Class, where she played essentially a one-woman show (two other in the cast with minor roles) as Maria Callas.  She was magnificent.

She followed that with a show called Vivien, written by playwright Rick Foster.  The show was such a hit that it went to New York, where it earned a nomination for a Drama Desk Award (sadly, it did not win).

It returned to Sacramento, which was when I first saw it.  I wrote, It’s a very special actor who can bring a legendary figure to life and make it believable, without making it a caricature. ...Now Janis Stevens has come along and provided us a magnificent Vivien Leigh, currently gracing the stage at Sacramento Theater Company,

Seven years later, she was back with Kate, a show written for her, by Foster, based on the observation of our friend, the late Mitch Agrus, that Stevens looked like Katharine Hepburn.  Again, she inhabited the body of Hepburn and gave us another unforgettable production.

So when I heard she was going to be in Driving Miss Daisy I knew it was going to be a wonderful show.  And it was.  With Michael J. Asberry as her driver Hoke, and Scott Divine as son Boolie, this was another hit, though I have to admit I was somewhat taken aback in the opening scene when Boolie tells his mother that at 72 she should not be driving any more and it was time to find her a driver.  No wonder Miss Daisy was huffy at the prospect, says the almost-73 year old writer here!

It was particularly interesting watching the three characters believably age 30 years in 90 minutes.

When the show was over we stood in a critics' circle of four talking about Blue Apron, since I had sent Patti Roberts' name in for a free week trial of food and she, like us, decided to keep it after all.  She and I were so enthusiastic about our experiences with Blue Apron that at one point she thought we were the perfect group to be filmed secretly for a commercial about the service!

The Start of a Busy Weekend

Today was another doctor day for my mother.  This time she was supposed to have a diabetic retinopathy screening, to make sure there was no diabetes lurking in her eyes.  It was impossible to explain to her where we were going or what we were going to do.  Fortunately, she followed docilely and didn't give me any argument.

Fortunately her doctor is a young male and she is at her most charming around men of any age, so she offered no argument about anything.

He put drops in her eyes and told her she needed to wait 15-30 minutes in the waiting room.  I explained to her what was happening and at about 10 minutes she got very frightened because her vision was blurry.  I explained the drops again and why he did it and that it was going to take a couple of hours for her pupils to return to their normal size and then a few minutes later she was afraid again because her vision was blurry.

Her eyes are fine and I made sure she had doctor-given sun glasses to go out into the sun, but of course they make her look "different" so she didn't like wearing them until she got into the sun which blinded her, so she put them on.  In the car, though, she took them off because her vision was blurry and she felt her glasses would fix it.  Sigh.  I just let her do what she wanted.  It was easier.

When I dropped her off, she asked if she was going to see me tomorrow.  I told her no because we were going to a brunch in the morning and I was reviewing a show later.  She pouted because that meant she wouldn't see me until Sunday...a whole day.  When I asked if she expected me to come every day, she said yes, she did because she gets lonely.  I told her that if she got lonely she could leave her apartment and go out into the lobby and sit with people there.  She said she didn't get that lonely.

Dinner tonight was vegetarian Calzone, filled with kale, mozzarella, parmesan and ricotta.  Definitely yummy, though I could only finish half of one.  There is another one (the recipe made 3) for tomorrow.  Also a lot of leftover filling, which I will try to do something creative with.  Another Blue Apron winner.

The show tonight was The Producers at the local community theater.  Wonderful performers, every one very strong in his or her role.  I just wish the company had more money so their sets could match the caliber of the performances.

I do two more shows this weekend, both in Sacramento and perhaps dinner with my mother and Ned on Sunday. And with all that, I'm trying to finish the book I'm reading, "The Gravity of Birds," by Tracy Guzeman.  This is a book club book and it's wonderful.  As I write this it is 1 a.m. and I plan to read for at least another hour before I call it a day and head off to sleep. 

A busy weekend.

Boxes and Boxes

Every Wednesday morning, the dogs go crazy and when I open the door to see why, I find a big box from Blue Apron which contains all the foods I will prepare for the following week.  I usually make a Blue Apron meal every other day (since we only get 3 meals a week).  Some of them leave us with leftovers that I serve to Walt the next night.

I am loving these meals for many reasons.  For one thing, we are eating better.  I am not good about fixing something green when I prepare a meal, and each of these Blue Apron meals come with veggies.  They are also each 700 calories or less.  Since my meals tend to go heavy on the starches, this is significantly better than we normally have.

I am also eating things I have never eaten before.  Several meals come with kale, which I swore I hated, but mixed in with the meals I am preparing I don't mind it.  I also cooked faro for the first time the other day.  I had just heard of this grain alternative the week before on the Food Network and generally am not adventurous to try something like that, but it was good in the Italian meatball soup that I prepared.

I have many strong childhood food memories, two of them unpleasant.  The first was one Christmas when I was in bed with some sort of intestinal bug...I don't know if we knew it was intestinal at the time, or if we didn't find out until later.  My mother had made a sort of Waldorf salad for dinner and brought me a bowl of it.  Apples, celery, grapes, walnuts and some sort of binder (mayonnaise?  marshmallow cream?).  I ate it and in short order lost it.  For years, possibly decades after that night, the sight of a similar salad gave me a headache.  I can eat it again now, finally.

But the other unpleasant memory is celeriac, the root of the celery plant. I'm not a big celery eater to begin with (unless it's loaded with peanut butter, which kind of negates the low cal properties of a stalk of celery!)

I remember one family dinner at my grandmother.  She had found some recipe--I think it was for a salad--that featured celeriac and decided to try it.  I hated it so much that it has burned an experience into my memory banks.  I can picture where I was sitting at the table, who was sitting across from me, and what the salad looked like on the plate.  I was probably in high school at the time.

But celeriac seems to be a popular ingredient in Blue Angel boxes.  One of the first meals I made contained a big bulb of celeriac that I boiled and mashed, like potatoes.  The box even came with an information page about celeriac, which says it can be roasted, sauteed, blanched, mashed or pureed.  It says that cooking "brings out celeriac's sweetness" and I found that having it mashed wasn't half bad.

Another recipe had it cut into chunks and cooked into a delicious chutney.  Of course that was the night I forgot to serve the chutney, so I didn't get to taste it the way it was supposed to taste.

Another hated vegetable of my childhood was collard greens, which I remember as being gritty and not nearly as tasty as the spinach they were supposed to resemble, but with the vinegar/maple syrup glaze over roast chicken it was delicious.

I've eaten jicama, which I did not think I liked, and a variety of mushrooms--and I'm a rather timid persons when it comes to unusual mushrooms (never ate oyster mushrooms before)

We've also had a plethora of oddly named spices, all of which are told to "add as much of the spice mix as you'd like, depending on how spicy you want it."  I generally add half.  Once I added the whole packet to a soup mix and it was even too spicy for Walt, who loves spicy food.  Blue Angel chefs tend to like their food spicy, I've learned.

The spices that we have had delivered to us include Gochugaru (Korean chile flakes), "meatball soup spice blend," "Mexican soup spice blend" (10 spices, including ground coffee--this one was the killer), "Pork Chop spice blend" (0nly 4 spices, but two of them were chiles), Sambal Oelek, Ponzu Sauce, Togarashi spice blend (only 4 spices, but one was togarashi and that must translate into "very spicy"), Golden Mountain Sauce, tamarind concentrate, harissa paste and a few milder spices that contain nothing hot.

They come in the cutest little containers or bottles that you've ever seen--looks like something from a doll's kitchen.  I wish I could think of a use for them because I have this compulsion to save them, but have managed to subdue that compulsion. The only thing Blue Apron does not supply is olive oil--and I have gone through a small bottle of it since we started this adventure.

So I'm having fun with Blue Apron and am broadening my nutritional horizons.  I am even learning to cook better.  I cooked lamb chops yesterday (not Blue Apron) and it was the first chop that I cooked which satisfied me in...well, maybe forever.  I have learned exactly HOW to cook the perfect chop.

But the boxes do pile up.  Walt finally had to make a special trip to the dump yesterday because he was running out of places to store them.  They'd make great boxes to pack books in but when the time comes to pack up books we will be able to get all the boxes we want!

Blue Apron

4 December 2015

It was exciting to drive up and see the box sitting in front of the door.

Laurel and I had discussed Blue Apron, a program which ships you the ingredients and instructions for x number of meals per week.  She said she and Tom had been using it for awhile and really liked it.  She also said that I could have the option of having three free meals to see if I liked it or not.

I knew I wasn't interested in it, but heck, I wouldn't say no to free meals.  My main concern, in addition to the expense, was that the meals would be too small for us.  We eat a lot (even tho I don't eat much at dinner).

I set it up with Blue Apron for 3 meals a week for 2 people.  The cost would be $60 a week, waived for the first week.  I was pleased to see that I could look at the meals before they were sent and if there was something I didn't want, I could make a substitution.  I could also choose to skip a week if I chose.  But here it was:  my first Blue Apron box.

I opened the box as soon as I got it inside and was pleased to see that the first thing on the top was cards for the menus included with instructions for how to make the meals.

Then came the "meat" of the box...and I was pleased to know that everything in the box is recyclable.  

Everything looked fresh and good.  There were ingredients for a beef dish, a chicken dish and a fish dish.  And everything was included, including a small piece of singer, and teeny packages of spices and the world's smallest bottle of soy sauce.

They recommend using the fish first so tonight I made Crispy Catfish Shoyu Ramen.  I never cook fish because it's too expensive, so I was pleased to have a fish dish to make.

I first boiled the noodles that were included (and realized immediately that this was more than enough for the two of us).  I then chopped all the things that needed chopping (scallions, yu choy and ginger) and cut the catfish into 4 pieces.

The fish got drenched in a spiced batter and deep fried and when the dish was finished, it looked like this.

I had given Walt the larger serving, and even at that, I could only eat helf of mine.  It was delicious.  We both agreed.  I talked about how if you think about it, it amounts to only $10 per person per meal. which is cheaper than a restaurant meal.  And based on what we got this week and what I see coming up in the next couple of weeks, we will be eating food I don't normally buy because it's too expensive.  We'll also be eating veggies, which I don't always cook.  And what's best is that I don't have to plan 3 of our meals during the week!

So, to my surprise, we are both happy with Blue Apron and are going to keep it going for awhile and see what we think.  

Thanks, Laurel!!!

Piece o' cake!