Thank you to Blue Apron for sponsoring this post! The first 50 readers to click here will get two free meals on their first order – enjoy. 🙂
Last week, something fun arrived in my inbox: a little 2015 year in review cooking recap from Blue Apron! As you guys know, Blue Apron delivers farm-fresh pre-portioned ingredients and accompanying recipes right to your doorstep for you to turn into delicious, chef-designed meals at home.
I loved this graphic – what a fun little overview! Apparently last year Matt and I cooked a whopping 114 Blue Apron meals together – that’s a LOT of good meals! Well, maybe more like 110 – a few were made with friends/my mom instead of Matt. 😉 Also – 62 garlic cloves were minced and found good homes in our stomachs. That’s beautiful right there.
I also loved seeing our first menu of 2016, which was apparently delivered on January 13, 2015! I remember the Mexican-Style Quinoa and Beef Casserole with Black Beans and Cheese (<—recipe) – that’s still one of my favorite Blue Apron meals. We actually prepped that one at home and then brought it with us to a friend’s place to bake, bulking it up with a side salad and some appetizers so we got 4 servings out of it!
The Pistachio-Crusted Catfish with Clementine Salad, Israeli Couscous and Roasted Fennel from that same week’s delivery was also amazing – I remember cooking it with my friend Ashley as a fun night in! I can’t believe that was a whole year ago…
As you guys know, I’ve been partnering with Blue Apron over the past year to share one sponsored review post each quarter, and for each of those 4 reviews I’ve gotten a free box of 3 meals. But all those other meals have been on our own dime – we just really love the service! It makes dinnertime so much less stressful and happier for both of us – and we waste less food, get a lot more variety, and try more interesting ingredients/preparation methods, too! And we can skip weeks anytime we need to for travel, so it’s nice and flexible. See also: 5 Reasons Why We Love Blue Apron.
Pictured above: Squid Ink Linguine Pasta with Shrimp and Cherry Tomatoes – we made this back in July!
For today’s post I thought it would be fun to round up a few of our other all-time favorites from our Blue Apron meals over the past year – I’ll link to all the recipes on their site if you’d like to try them out on your own!
First up: Rice and Beef Stuffed Poblano Peppers with Lime-Crema Sauce. Delicious and creative!
A great basic dinner with a delicious/foodie twist: Seared Chicken and Caramelized Fennel (we added the carrots). I <3 fennel.
Simple but unique and satisfying: Spiced Turkey Meatball Pitas with Sugar Snap Pea and Bibb Lettuce Salad. The yogurt sauce was really good too!
This one won for most creative (we’d never heard of furikake before!): Furikake-topped Salmon with Fresh Edamame and Miso-Sesame Black Noodles. (We added the asparagus.)
And finally, Matt’s favorite: homemade Vietnamese chicken wings with lemongrass brown rice. 🙂
It was hard to choose favorites – we had so many good Blue Apron meals last year! Here’s to many more. 🙂
Before I go, a couple things:
-
Blue Apron has been continuing to prioritize a sustainable food system and use of high quality ingredients, which is awesome. You can read more about their efforts to support sustainable fishing, responsible farming, and to reduce food waste over on their mission page.
-
Blue Apron recently launched a great recycling program! We always recycle the packaging ourselves, but now you can actually send back your items (free of charge, and at no extra carbon footprint since USPS uses existing delivery routes) to them for recycling and reuse instead. Read more about it here.
Happy cooking, my friends, and don’t forget the first 50 readers to click here will get two free meals on their first order. Enjoy!
If you’re a Blue Apron fan already, what’s the best meal you’ve made from the service?
If you’ve never tried it, which of the meals I noted in this post would you most like to try?
