Getting Inspired and Out of the Box in the Kitchen

This post is sponsored by Blue Apron.

I was first introduced to Blue Apron back in February and I have been talking about it with friends and family ever since.

If you’re not familiar with Blue Apron, it’s a service that delivers all the farm-fresh ingredients you need to make three or four meals right to your door in a refrigerated box. They send you exactly the right proportions so no trips to the grocery store are necessary and you don’t experience waste from unused ingredients.

It is such a wonderful feeling to come home at the end of a long day and have the instructions and ingredients on hand to make a creative, nutritious and delicious home-cooked meal. The best way for me to share Blue Apron with you is through photos of the amazing meals I’ve made thanks to their chef-created recipes.

In my most recent delivery, I received three meals with a chicken, fish and beef recipes for two. I asked my fiance which recipe he wanted to try first and I was surprised when he went with the chicken salad. We’re usually not salad at dinner people and chicken salad sounded pretty plain.

This salad was nowhere near plain! I like to think that I’m a pretty creative salad maker but Hearty Chicken Salad with New Potatoes, Pickled Rhubarb & Goat Cheese blew me out of the water.

It was such a unique combination of flavors and textures with tarragon, rhubarb, asparagus, radishes, potatoes, butter lettuce and a poppy seed dressing.

I was especially interested in using rhubarb in a salad. You were instructed to shred it and place it in a pickling liquid of water, vinegar and sugar while prepping the rest of the salad.

The chicken was boiled along with the potatoes and asparagus and then shredded. I appreciated that this could all be done in varying stages in one pot.

I can’t say that I boil chicken very often when I’m looking for a flavorful chicken breast but once it was tossed with the other ingredients and the dressing, it really soaked up all of the flavors.  The mix was placed on top of the butter lettuce. The portion was very generous and we LOVED it. I’m seriously considering going to the store to buy all of the ingredients to make this salad again because writing about it is making me crave it! It’s one of the best salads I’ve had in a long time (and that says a lot coming from me!).

You can find the recipe for Hearty Chicken Salad with New Potatoes, Pickled Rhubarb and Goat Cheese on Blue Apron’s website.

The next meal we tried was the Steamed Cod with Pickled Ramps and Yu Choy. I made this on a Friday night and it made for a nice dinner in.

Blue Apron makes the prep work so easy for you! They literally send you everything you need including spice sacks, oils and vinegars, herbs, garlic, etc. I was looking forward to trying this recipe because it was my first time cooking with ramps and yu choy at home. If you’re not familiar with ramps, they are a variety of wild onion. Yu choy is a tender Chinese green that is in the mustard family but tastes more like spinach.

After reading some of the online recipe reviews, I decided to get my ramps in the pickling liquid first so they would have a little more time to mellow out and started my brown rice as early as possible to give it plenty of time to cook since it takes longer than white.

I really liked Blue Apron’s method for steaming the cod. Rather than use a steamer basket, they just had you place the fish on top of the greens, add some water to the skillet and partially cover. It resulted in a very flaky and moist fish that required no extra oil or fats to cook.

After steaming the cod, the cod and yu choy was served over the brown rice with a sweet ginger soy sauce and topped with the pickled ramps and cilantro.

You can find the recipe for the Steamed Cod with Pickled Ramps and Yu Choy on Blue Apron’s website.

My final recipe of this shipment was Mushroom & Swiss Burgers with Pan-Seared Fingerling Potatoes. The making of this recipe just happened to be one of those days where I could really use a burger and some comfort food so the timing was perfect.

I originally thought…”oh, I’ll pass on the bun” but then the combination of all of the ingredients together made it impossible to skip. This burger was great! They sent a delicious spice mix for the ground beef.

What set these burgers apart was this homemade mushroom sauce with sauteed mushrooms, onions, beef demi-glace and tomato paste.

I usually default to roasting my potatoes in the oven but I really liked the pan searing method used in the recipe. Definitely something to keep in mind for hot summer months when I don’t want to turn on the oven. The addition of the fresh rosemary really made these potatoes special.

You can find the recipe for the Mushroom & Swiss Burgers with Pan-Seared Fingerling Potatoes on Blue Apron’s website.

They make all of their recipes available online…check them out! I want to try the Chickpea Burgers, the Rice Flake Crusted Hake and the Spring Miso Ramen.

So that’s my latest from Blue Apron. I really love this service. Although I love to cook, Blue Apron takes all of the stress off of figuring out what I want to cook while introducing me to new ingredients, techniques and cooking methods. One of the best things about Blue Apron is that no commitment is required so you can do a week here and there whenever you need some dinner simplification and inspiration.

Blue Apron offers a family plan and a two-person plan and price per serving ranges from $8.49 to $9.99 with free shipping. Blue Apron recently launched in Texas and is now serving the majority of the country.

Don’t forget, you can try it out for yourself and get two free meals if you’re one of the first 50 readers.

Thank you to Blue Apron for providing me with a week of meals and for sponsoring this post. The opinions are all my own!