Recently, a friend was kind enough to send a Blue Apron referral our way so we got to give their service a spin w/ no out of pocket cost. Long story short: interesting recipes w/ high quality ingredients resulted in one amazing meal and two not quite amazing tho still excellent meals. Sadly, City Boy dropped the ball and failed to photograph the first meal we made (garlic lemongrass burgers w/ sriracha mayo). Turns out, it was the amazing one out of the three. Meal two was seared chicken w/ creamy cous cous. While it didn't quite reach the high bar set by the first meal, it was very good. Chicken only had minimal seasoning, wasn't brinned and was simply pan seared, its sauce topping of olives, raisin and verjus more than elevated the taste to the next level. Crème fraîche, celery and tomato paste gave the cous cous surprisingly excellent texture and flavor.
Meal three was another pan seared affair; this time, salmon alongside roasted potato kale salad. Perfect potatoes (made by Country Girl, bien sûr) with pickled shallots was next level. Salmon also turned out well. All three dishes were noteworthy in how much flavor resulted from so few ingredients. City Boy was amazed at this whole stove top protein cooking approach ending well. At least in this box, Blue Apron absolutely knocked it out of the park: providing fun, interesting and accessible recipes paired with high quality ingredients. Super happy we tried it and will def be open to doing trials w/ other services. With that said, hard to justify it as anything other than an occasional indulgence at ten bucks/meal.
