Reviewed by
Mary
Whether you’re a busy mom or cooking for yourself, Blue Apron makes cooking delicious dinners fun and easy with their weekly meal delivery subscription boxes. Every week, Blue Apron offers a new menu that offers subscribers a variety new, seasonal meals to cook. Then Blue Apron ships you all the ingredients and an easy-to-follow recipe so you can cook the dinners in your own kitchen. With today’s Blue Apron review, we’re unboxing our August 2017 Blue Apron meal delivery box.
Blue Apron boxes ship via FedEx with several cool packs to ensure your proteins, dairy, and produce are cool and fresh when you receive them. Here’s the first look inside our Blue Apron August meal box.
Inside Our August 2017 Blue Apron Meal Delivery Box
Our weekly August 2017 Blue Apron box contained ingredients and recipes for:
- Seared Steaks & Thyme Pan Sauce with Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans, & Crispy Shallot
- Miso Chicken Ramen with Tomatoes, Corn, & Kombu
- Meatballs & Polenta with Heirloom Tomato Sauce
Blue Apron includes recipes cards for each of the meals in your meal delivery box. The recipes provide step-by-step instructions and pictures to help you cook the meal. There was also a card that described the cooking technique of charring your vegetables.
Seared Steaks & Thyme Pan Sauce with Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans, & Crispy Shallot
The first Blue Apron meal we cooked up was the Seared Steaks & Thyme Pan Sauce. Blue Apron delivered all the ingredients – from the beef to the fresh herbs to the veg. We just needed to use salt, pepper, and olive oil from our own pantry.
To prep, Blue Apron instructs us to chop the potatoes, trim the beans, slice the scallions, and dice the garlic. The green beans were blanched and then shocked in ice water. We coated the shallots with the flour, salt and pepper before we fried them up.
After chopping the potatoes, they were cooked with half the garlic, then mashed with the creme fraiche.
While the potatoes cooked, it was time to sear the steaks. They were simply seasoned with salt and pepper, then cooked with a drizzle of olive oil.
After the steaks cooked, we used the fond, the remaining garlic, thyme, vinegar, and butter to create a wonderfully flavorful sauce. The green beans, topped with the crispy shallots, mashed potatoes, and sliced seared steak, topped with the yummy thyme pan sauce, all went onto a single plate to be enjoyed.
This meal was so savory and so fulfilling. The steak was juicy and you could really taste the flavor of the thyme in the sauce. We loved the addition of the crispy shallots for texture and the garlic was a nice touch to the creamy mashed potatoes.
Miso Chicken Ramen with Tomatoes, Corn, & Kombu
We prepared the Blue Apron Miso Chicken Ramen for lunch the next day. Since it was a warm day, and this is a dish served cool, it was the perfect lunch.
As usual, Blue Apron has us start with prepping the ingredients. Then we seasoned the tomatoes to prepare them for marinating with the cucumber, ginger and mirin. After seasoning the chicken with salt and pepper from the pantry, we cooked it with olive oil in a pan.
After the chicken was fully cooked, we transferred it to a cutting board and shredded it into small, bite-sized pieces. Using the same pan, we cooked the corn with ginger and scallions. This smelled so good as it cooked! Blue Apron provided the ramen noodles, which quickly cooked in boiling water. They were dressed with soy sauce and kombu (a type of dried seaweed.)
The Miso Chicken with Ramen was a surprise new favorite for us! The flavors were hearty but the meal didn’t leave us feeling heavy. The fresh tomatoes, corn and cucumber added bright flavors to the meal.
Meatballs & Polenta with Heirloom Tomato Sauce
The Meatballs & Polenta was our last dish in our August Blue Apron Box. We appreciated how easy this dish was to make. Prep was quick – just chop the garlic, dice the tomato, and stem the basil. Then we formed the meatballs with a mixture made of the ground beef, egg, breadcrumbs, oregano, garlic and cheese, seasoned with salt and pepper from our pantry.
After cooking the meatballs for a few minutes, we added the tomato, garlic, water and a touch of red pepper flakes to the same pan. After covering with foil, it was time to let that cook and simmer down into a thick sauce.
While the meatballs cooked, we made the polenta. The polenta was added to boiling water and then whisked until the water was fully absorbed. We finished the polenta with the provided spice blend, Fromage blanc, and olive oil. To serve we plated the polenta and topped it with the meatballs and sauce. Torn basil leaves and cheese were the finishing touches.
The Meatballs & Polenta was another satisfying meal. The meatballs were amazing, juicy and seasoned just right. The torn basil adds a great freshness and you can’t be fresh pasta sauce. We were really looking forward to this meal because we’ve been wanting to learn how to cook polenta for a long time. The creamy polenta was the perfect contrast to the meatballs. We love that Blue Apron teaches you how to cook so many different types of dishes.
What dinners did you get in your latest Blue Apron box?
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By Bethany 
