Thank you to Blue Apron for sending me some delicious meal kits to test out so I could share my experience. If you’d like to give it a try, save $20 on your first order with our special link.
What is Blue Apron?
Blue Apron sends meal kits on a subscription basis. Each delivery is comprised of recipe cards and fresh pre-measured ingredients for you to prepare at home. Choose from two to four meals per week (to serve either 2 or 4 people) and then let them take all the planning, shopping, and prep away. My family was thrilled to take a brief vacation from quesadillas and hot dogs.
The two meals we ate this week were: katsu-style cod with ginger rice and sesame snow peas and pan-seared chicken with rustic arugula pesto, fingerling potatoes, and roasted veggies.
After cooking with a virtual sous chef through Blue Apron, my two favorite use cases are: At-home Date Night and Get a Kid Cooking.
Date night without a babysitter
I am a huge fan of making dinner after the little one is in bed so that my husband and I can reconnect. Huge. Cooking unfamiliar dishes out of cookbooks is how we spent a lot of time together before we got married, so it feels instantly nostalgic to work together in the kitchen. The fresh menu ingredients from Blue Apron make planning and executing a delicious meal crazy easy. We still get to do the more fun parts of chopping and sizzling, but we dirty fewer dishes because many of the items are already measured.
But, reality these days? I’d love to paint the picture of my husband and I doing the kitchen dance of cooking together (truth) and dining alone together (false). When our oldest was a baby, this is exactly the way we’d do our dinner dates. We are now accompanied by three little boys.
How did they like Blue Apron? The older two joined us and really loved the food. Our youngest ate a waffle.
{Picture in your mind two children in mismatched clothes smiling and eating their dinners with terrible table manners and one smaller child eating a peanut butter waffle without a care in the world. The food is gone before Mama can photograph it!}
Make your dinner date easy peasy with Blue Apron > (ps they do wine pairings, too!)
Sharing cooking duties with a kid helper
Though I used to make all kinds of time for my toddler to wash and rip lettuce when he was an only child, something about having three kids has me sticking them all in front of the television when I prepare dinner most nights. If I were interested in taking baby steps to get my children back in the kitchen to learn the ropes around the sink and stove, these meal kits would be fantastic! Blue Apron does the meal planning and shopping and the recipe cards show all the steps with photographs and words.
Blue Apron makes cooking with children less painful. You know all those steps you have to do before a kid even walks into the kitchen to crack the eggs and make a mess? These are done for you — except for clearing the counter; you still have to do that.
Get your kiddo cooking for the family with Blue Apron > (save $20 on your first order)
Bottom line: I totally recommend giving Blue Apron a try for an easy at-home dinner date with baby, a helping hand to get your kids cooking, and more creative everyday meals without the planning and shopping.
Pro tip: To extend the “family-size” to larger families, you might want to have an additional side dish or loaf of bread at the ready. For both meals last week, we had an extra portion of the protein to save for lunch but the sides were gone.
I was compensated by Blue Apron for this post. All opinions are mine and those of my family. My kids liked our Blue Apron meals so much, I felt self-conscious about my own cooking!
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