Category Archives: Food

Blue Apron — a great idea that needs some work

Food

One of my most dreaded weekly tasks is planning and buying food for daily meals. It was worse when the kids were home, but even now, with just the two of us, planning meals is a pain. I usually end up just buying the same things and cooking the same things week after week. Some sort of pasta meal, some sort of Tex-Mex meal, some sort of casserole, etc. If Dean feels like cooking we either have something grilled or something fried.

Then I heard about Blue Apron. I may have seen an ad on Facebook and checked it out or maybe I saw an ad somewhere else, but either way, I really wanted to try the service. If you’re not familiar with Blue Apron — it is a fairly new (about two years old) company out of Brooklyn, NY that sends you all the ingredients and recipes for three unusual meals each week. All you need are salt, pepper and oil. What got me to finally subscribe to Blue Apron was a sponsored blog post on Amalah where the funniest blogger in the world talked about how delicious the meals were and how her kids and foodie husband loved them.

I was so excited about my first shipment that I think I checked the Blue Apron website several times an hour each day before my first blue and white box arrived. Dean was okay with it — but skeptical. Our first three meals were Chicken Hiyashi Chuka, Seared Cod Piperade and Peperonata & Fried Eggs. We liked the first two (Dean loved the cod) but the peperonata and eggs were served over homemade polenta that could have cooked longer.

We continued to get shipments and I continued to be excited about each box and talked it up to friends and family until the week of the Blue Apron typo. I was not terribly excited about the Crispy Fish Sandwiches with cole slaw and homemade tartar sauce, but decided to give it a go anyway. When I saw that it called for 1 tablespoon of salt to be added to the shredded cabbage I knew that was too much, but thought it was to extract the liquid from the cabbage and would be rinsed out. By the time I got to the step where I would have rinsed the salt from the cabbage I guess I forgot and just went with the recipe. As you can imagine the slaw was ruined. I read reviews about the dish and saw several complaining about the salt.

About the same time I’d sent Clare a couple of weeks of Blue Apron for a gift. The first week she was excited but didn’t like the food she made and thought it was too much work and made too much of a mess in her small kitchen. The second week she was sent meat instead of vegetarian recipes. (her fault, she didn’t check the vegetarian option this time) To their credit, Blue Apron sent her a couple free weeks of food because the first package was delivered a day late and because the second contained meat.

Since we were visiting Clare the week after the salty slaw meal we figured we could re-purpose the meat she was sent and maybe make one of her meals at a cabin we were renting on the Olympic Peninsula. The meat looked a little iffy, so we tossed it (Clare was not sure how long it was not refrigerated) but Clare and I made a very good and unusual pizza from one of their recipes that had been delivered.

The day before we left for Maryland, Clare got yet another Blue Apron delivery so we decided to make everything in the box in one meal and invite Clare’s roommate, Bennett, to have a vegetarian feast with us.

The meal began with a Moroccan-Spiced Heirloom Cauliflower Salad, continued with White Chili and ended with a Cauliflower and Kale casserole. Sounds okay, right? It was awful. But awful in a fun way since the four of us suffered through these dishes while sitting in the hallway of Clare’s amazing apartment building.

So back to Blue Apron — I think Blue Apron is a great idea. They have a wonderful help desk staffed with folks who seem genuinely interested in your happiness with the company. I don’t think I am the target audience for the company, however, since I’ve been cooking for decades and can probably come up with recipes as good or better then their best recipes. Their best recipes are very good but they also have a few duds. Of course it is a matter of opinion. What I like is different from what someone else likes (seen much of the time in my reaction to the meals versus what Dean thought about them).

I am not stopping my subscription — in fact I am getting a delivery the week of December 15 when I will be making Gnocchi with Sausage and Savoy Cabbage, Roasted & Stewed Chicken with Potato Latkes & Crème Fraîche and Macadamia-Crusted Cod with Forbidden Rice, Golden Beet & Avocado Salad. Dean won’t be pleased with the chicken, but hopefully he will like the gnocchi and cod.

If you do plan on trying Blue Apron make sure you check for comments on the recipes (at the bottom under “Tips for Home Chefs”) before you start cooking. Had I done that with the coleslaw recipe I would never have added a tablespoon of salt.

 

A pumpkiny experiment

Food

cone-shaped sieveMany years ago, back when I still lived with my parents. Back when I was still in love with an Englishman. Back before I’d ever heard of a food processor I decided to make pumpkin pie from an actual pumpkin. Back then I imagine we made our pumpkin pies from canned pumpkin pie filling (the sweetened kind — not the pumpkin puree). I really don’t know because I have never been a real fan of pumpkin pie. Which is why this is so confusing — me making a pumpkin pie from a pumpkin.

stringy pumpkinThe only thing I actually remember about making the pie was putting the pumpkin through a cone-shaped sieve on tall legs. I remember using a wooden pestle and smushing the cooked pumpkin through the holes in the sieve. I do sort of vaguely remember presenting Jeremy with the pie, but it doesn’t logistically make sense since Jeremy only ever visited in the summer — before pumpkins were for sale.

A few years ago I helped my mom go through her Wisconsin lake house kitchen. She wanted to donate some stuff that she never used. During the kitchen cleaning we came across a cone-shaped sieve with a wooden pestle. I asked if I could have it because I remembered making that pie. She said I could take it home.

the sieve at workOnce at home I put the cone-shaped sieve and wooden pestle away and forgot I had it for the most part, but when pumpkin season came around I wanted to buy a pumpkin, cook it and put it through the sieve like I did so many years ago. I didn’t even get to the sieve part because during baking the Pyrex casserole dish on which I’d placed the pumpkin halves exploded in my oven.

It took me seven years to work up the nerve to try again and I nearly forgot to use the sieve. I found a recipe for pumpkin puree on line (okay 2,270,000 recipes) and proceeded to roast the pumpkin (no Pyrex exploded in this episode), put it through the food processor, then measure it into Ziploc bags. I was about to fill the second bag when I noticed little white bits in the puree. I didn’t want stringy pumpkin pie. Then the light bulb came on. The sieve!

stringless pumpkinI put the remaining puree through the sieve (after cleaning it well — it had been collecting dust for the past 7 years after all — and was amazed at the lack of strings. I finished the puree this way and now have 14 cups of stringless pumpkin puree in the freezer.

I still do not like pumpkin pie — but the rest of the family does — so perhaps this will be a success. I don’t know when, if ever, I will use the sieve and pestle again, but I am glad I remembered it for this task.

And no, I still have not made anything from the puree.

Grandma Green’s Recipe Box Part 1: 500 Delicious Dishes from Leftovers

Food, Series, , , , ,

Several years ago when my Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack moved to Mississippi Aunt Ginny gave me a box of recipes that she said were her mother’s — my grandmother’s. I looked through the box a few years ago and planned to try a few recipes at some time in the future. I never did get around to that and since I was feeling a little lazy today, thought I would take a look at the recipes in detail. About half of the contents of the box consists of recipes clipped out of magazines or newspapers and the other half consists of booklets containing recipes that fit a theme or use a particular brand or style of cooking.

500 Recipes from Leftovers

The oldest booklet, copyrighted 1941 and written by the Culinary Institute of America, is called 500 Delicious Dishes from Leftovers. The introduction begins, “Rare indeed is the day when a modern housewife could not find in her refrigerator all sorts of odds and ends in the way of food. And it is these leftovers that challenge the imagination of the alert homemaker.”

Here is a recipe for leftover ground meat and leftover noodles:

Fricadellons with Noodles

  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons fat
  • 1 cup dry bread softened in 1 cup water
  • 2 cups leftover ground meat
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
  • 1/8 teaspoon alspice
  • 1.4 teaspoon salt
  • Dash pepper
  • 3 cups leftover noodles
  • 1/2 cup warm milk

Brown onion lightly in 1 tablespoon fat. Press water from bread; add onion, meat, egg and seasonings. Mix well. Shape into small balls or flat cakes and saute until crisp in remaining fat. Moisten noodles with warm milk and reheat. Make a ring of noodles, fill center with Succotash and border with the fricadellons. Serves 4.

I won’t be making that — or anything else in the book — but won’t toss the book in the trash either. Let me know if you need a delicious dish recipe from a leftover, I bet I can find one for you.