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After cooking for close to 45 years I am over it. The shopping, chopping, preparing and clean-up for one person is just too much. I am also not a foodie; I eat to survive but it's not a big deal like with some people. Sometimes for dinner I will have a salad with a protein of some sort or make yellow rice & beans with chicken so I have leftovers and don't have to cook. Many nights I will make a Healthy Choice frozen dinner.
My niece was using one of those food services but she stopped; I'll have to ask her why. Maybe I'll give it a try.
We're retired, with all the time in the world to cook from scratch, and have been getting Blue Apron for over three years.
I like the convenience of having the ingredients delivered to my doorstep, having the spices in just the amounts I need with no leftovers to get stale, learning about new foods and learning to eat foods that I previously would never had thought to try.
At this point we only get the service twice a month as many of the recipes I can duplicate on my own.
At this stage in life, I am sick of trying of decide what to cook for dinner, grocery shopping,
putting it all away, etc. Blue Apron works for us.
This, to the T!
I subscribe to two services for more variety, one of them has more basic recipes but more of the prep work is already done for you, the other involves more prepping but has a wider variety of recipes and ingredients available.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but things like squid ink pasta, labneh, and ras el hanout aren't hanging around my local grocery store shelves, so this is one way for me to experience cooking new cuisines without having to go to a lot of time and trouble to locate ingredients. I usually order two kits a month.
I also go to the grocery store and keep stocked up on fresh vegetables to add to the recipes so I can stretch them. By doing this I get four meals out of 'two' servings. It brings my cost down to about five dollars a meal, still a bit pricey, but worth it to me for the convenience of not having to figure out what to cook, not having to drive all over to find the more unusual ingredients, and not winding up with a cabinet full of sauces and spices I've invested in only to discover I don't really like them or don't really have much use for them.
After cooking for close to 45 years I am over it. The shopping, chopping, preparing and clean-up for one person is just too much. I am also not a foodie; I eat to survive but it's not a big deal like with some people. Sometimes for dinner I will have a salad with a protein of some sort or make yellow rice & beans with chicken so I have leftovers and don't have to cook. Many nights I will make a Healthy Choice frozen dinner.
My niece was using one of those food services but she stopped; I'll have to ask her why. Maybe I'll give it a try.
If you are trying to avoid prep and cooking, these meal boxes are not the thing.
Well that stinks - the main reason for me liking my healthy frozen meals is I don't have to do any of the prep work. The problem is there isn't much variety in frozen dinners even the ones that are healthy with lots of protein and little bad carbs.
Got Blue Apron for about 6 months, about a year and a half ago.
1. Made me realize that I traditionally either spend time prepping, then toss in a pot to cook on its own, or very little prep time, but lots of time spent on cooking. With Blue Apron, there was tons of prep AND tons of cooking time. Part of the reason I dropped the service. My husband works random hours, and we ended up eating very late most nights.
2. Ingredients were top notch. Every piece of meat, every vegetable was great quality.
3. Tried lots of food and cooking techniques that wouldn't have otherwise. Still use many of them.
4. Waste - LOTS of waste. Every ingredient came in a plastic bag or cup. We threw away so much packaging, it wasn't even funny.
5. We hit a stretch where they were advertising a lot, and you could tell they were overwhelmed. We ultimately decided to stop the service when one meal came with a side that was literally parsley and a stalk of celery made into a salad, with a lemon, salt and pepper dressing. We looked back at the recipes from 6 months before, and they had gotten simpler and cheaper, and it just wasn't worth the money.
Between learning to cook as a child and being a professional in the food service industry, I don't find cooking to be especially time consuming and I enjoy the process of food shopping and preparing meals. That being said, I have friends and relatives who have received these meal planning services and have really liked them. For one friend in particular who only received the service for a trial period, it introduced him to to a new-to-him foodstuffs/food combinations that he might never have otherwise tried. For my sister, a fairly proficient home cook and adventurous eater herself, it was a way of having restaurant-style food without having to actually go out after a long workweek.
As others have said, they are expensive for what you get.
BUT, they are good, and we did it for awhile and it really introduced some new flavors, styles, recipes, to our kitchen. Nothing that was way "out there," but definitely stuff outside of our normal repoertoire.
AND, as two people (my wife and I) we weren't forced to buy ingredients that sat and went bad. That was the other nice thing, little waste. Yes, I understand that I paid more for less but I wasn't left with either a recipe for a family or a half a can of peppers that I didn't want to throw out but didn't want to eat and didn't have a use for later that week.
for me it's good if one member of family is on very specific diet/lifestyle ie paleo, keto, AIP or whole30. I alternate between whole30 and paleo but rest of my family is husband with 2 young growing boys so those meal kits wouldn't work for them nor be enough!
I order for myself 2 meals a week and I fix the family meals they like and modify for myself. As it is, it's a lot of work and prep for me. so I see the meal kit help me to save time to spend with my family vs hours in grocery store and in kitchen slaving away.
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