Riverside Ovens
Test Kitchen

The two greatest secrets for success of the Blue Apron dining and delivery service for us are the simplicity of the cooking instructions that come along with the packaged meal, and the fact the

ingredients are pre-portioned.  One of the real problems with cooking gourmet at home is that invariably you end up buying more bok choy than you really need; or that you end up with a package of fresh basil from which you only needed two leaves; or the catfish sits in the refrigerator longer than what would be recommended to maintain its freshness.  Although overall too heavy in packaging to be truly sustainable, the Blue Apron at least solves the problem of wasted food because

each primary and secondary ingredient (the smallest bagged and wrapped as 'knick knacks') is used on the spot, for that particular meal, and is out of the refrigerator.  The one page, two-sided, graphic recipe card is also very visual and easy to follow with a step by step model that tends to offer even more simple to follow steps than standard cookbooks.  They even provide a checklist of boxes for dinner time cook who might have more on the mind than the béchamel and gratin assembly.  The ingredients make for an easy pre-cooking set-up; the visual steps provide for a near fail safe cooking program. Combined, the Blue Apron meal almost always turns out very good to great and that inspires the home cook to try more gourmet cooking, which is a very good thing.

Our most recent Blue Apron was the Blackened Cajun Catfish with Sweet Potato & Collard Green Gratin.  This is the perfect example of a meal that we might not have made otherwise. We cook fish quite often, but never catfish.  Since it was already picked for us, packaged well, and fresh, it looked to be a great choice and we were happy to try it.  Rarely would we ever apply cajun spicing to a meat for a family meal, but the packet was small and we only smattered a portion onto the fish so as not to become too spicy for anybody.  Often, you find that lightly seasoning something, even if the mixture is potent, will mostly cook off in the process in the pan with oil, leaving only a residual taste.

The gratin might have been something we would try otherwise -- we are all fans of yams and sweet potatoes and have tried any number of recipes including simply cutting them lengthwise in eighths and baking them as large fries.  The gratin is a process of simple pan frying to start, folding in chopped collard greens, water and lemon juice, cooking until the greens are mostly wilted.  At this point, with short cooking time and without any addition of spice, the gratin is a near super-food, yams and greens.  You come to add this combination to a béchamel sauce, consisting of butter, garlic, flour, milk, water. Combine the two, then bake for 20 minutes.

The catfish takes a simple pan fry in oil, 4-5 minutes per side. The exterior will have a coated brown look, the fish needs to be warm to hot through the center.  Put together, the béchamel vegetable gratin is a moist green up against a blackened fish that is surprisingly flavorful in its own right, with relatively no bones to fear.  In well under an hour's time, a meal that might not have tried is sitting on your plate, fresh, hot, and all used up.