Eating Outside the Box

As we are spending most of our evenings at home these days, food delivery has taken on a new meaning. There are so many well-assembled boxes available now to help us out, but which ones are the best? I have tried my hand at several of the meal delivery kits, such as Hello Fresh, Home Chef, and Blue Apron, writing about them here in some detail. If only I had known about consumersadvocate.org, I could have possibly saved money (and most definitely time) to see how these boxes stack up first! While I am a great believer in experiencing things for oneself, consumersadvocate.org provides a handy, thorough guideline to cooking, out of these boxes: Hello Fresh, Home Chef, Sun Basket, Every Plate, Freshly, Plated, and Blue Apron.

Click here for their "Best Meal Delivery Services" to get their comprehensive guide based on convience, shipping and delivery, cost, quality of ingredients and the variety of cuisines offered.

In the meantime, here's a recipe I featured from Blue Apron for Lemongrass Shrimp, peppered with my comments.

A peek into what's inside the boxes!



Do enjoy and thanks to consumersadvocate.org!

Spaghetti & Squash-Unboxed!

I've tried several of the food delivery services, enticed by claims of convenience, portioned ingredients for three complete meals tailored to families or couples, all cleverly packaged in boxes with attractive, tidily composed recipe cards. Here's a basic re-cap: Quinciple (expensive, recipes good, striking, unique produce but nothing is pre-measured and not all ingredients are included); Hello Fresh (pricey still, decent recipes if not a little dull, the frozen fish is not great and I recall lots of chopping). In a 'Where's Waldo?' moment, I was even featured in a promotional Blue Apron video for a few fleeting seconds. I think Blue Apron kicked off the pre-measured ingredient idea but there's still a lot of chopping involved in their wildly varying yet only mildly interesting recipes of late.

So what ultimately did I discover then, this cooking out of all these boxes? Simple. As ideal as it sounds having a menu selected for you and where the only task is assembling the ingredients given to you, I realized I don't like to be told what to make in the kitchen. I prefer instead to be inspired to make a meal that I find intriguing. This does not include the proliferation of suggested slaws that seem to unite all of these food delivery services.

No, I much prefer making things I have a hankering for and I also love composing meals based on things we already have on hand. To wit, what to do with a box of pasta staring back at you from out of the cupboard? A pureed pouch of frozen butternut squash made a lovely sauce with sage for pasta (outlining a Tyler Florence recipe, I substituted here and there--such as ground sage instead of fresh and opted out of using chopped chestnuts entirely). Another bag of chopped frozen squash and zucchini for our daily vegetables was a great mixed-in topping. It all came together quickly and I didn't have to leave the house. How's that for cooking outside the box?