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Category Archives: cooking

I make! Blue Apron edition

I’ve been trying out Blue Apron, a subscription…food…delivery…service…?  I don’t actually know how to describe them.  Anyway, you subscribe to their service and they have sent you fresh ingredients for you to make meals according to the week’s menu.  I decided to try it out because sometimes I don’t have time to actually go buy ingredients for myself or I don’t want to figure out my week’s meal plan but still want to cook.  So this works out for me.  Also, they sponsor a whole bunch of podcasts I listen to, so I got a discount.

Anyway, I’ve tried the service out a few times now.  It’s kind of fun.  But probably because I already like to cook.  Their instructions are fairly clear, although I’ve noticed some typos that could potentially be very confusing who doesn’t cook all the time.  And I don’t like how they suggest you salt your food after every step.  That’s a lot of salt.  A. LOT. OF. SALT.  I don’t believe salt/saltiness should be the dominant flavor in most dishes.  I regard that as being lazy and/or cheap.  At full price, it’s comparable to going out to eat if you don’t always eat at fancypants restaurants, so you’re not saving a ton of money.  But at least you know what’s going into your food and the ingredients they send you are good quality.

Thus far, I just receive one box per month, which includes ingredients for two different meals.  I look at the month’s menu beforehand and opt out of the recipes that I could easily make myself or eat/cook a lot already.  I like to try the stuff I wouldn’t normally cook or don’t have the ingredients for.  Here’s what I think thus far.

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Crispy curried catfish with chana masala and brown rice

This was pretty good.  I don’t normally like catfish but it was cleaned well and didn’t have that muddy flavor.  Also, I like chickpeas.  And I forgot to take a picture when I served.  So you have a Tupperware shot.

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Beef stew and cheese mashed potatoes with carrots and thyme

This was kind of normal.  Not bad, it just doesn’t particularly stand out to me.  I make beef stew sometimes already.  I make a Guinness beef stew that I like better than this one.  I also just did a quick search and realized that I never posted about the beef stew.  Oh well.

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Garlic-herb butter shrimp with roasted cauliflower and brown rice

I like shrimp but I REALLY don’t like peeling shrimp.  Thus, I don’t make shrimp that often, which is why I opted in for this box.  It wasn’t bad except that I believe they were using Gulf shrimp, which has a characteristic briney taste that I don’t care for.  I probably wouldn’t make this again.  But it did make me realize that I quite like roasted cauliflower.

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Stir-fried beef and udon noodles with gai lan and Thai basil

I very much like udon and I rarely have it stir-fried.  We normally use udon in noodle soups when we’re too lazy to make our own noodles (I grew up eating hand-pulled noodles, nbd).  This was pretty good because I really like gai lan tsai.  I also find it funny that there’s no English name for it.  I also REALLY like Thai basil.  So, it was hard to find anything wrong with this menu.  I might make it again, but probably not if it’s just for me.

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Seared cod and garlic-ginger rice with Ponzu-glazed broccoli

I like fish a lot.  I probably eat too much fish.  I don’t think very many people can say that.  But I think I really might eat too much fish to the point where I should be concerned about mercury poisoning.  Fun fact.  Anyway, I didn’t much care for this recipe.  The rice was neither garlicky nor gingery enough to warrant calling it garlic-ginger rice.  The cod wasn’t bad.  I like cod.  But I really didn’t like the broccoli, which is weird because it’s one of my favorite vegetables.  I think the Ponzu glaze was too overpowering.

 

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Pork chops and apple mostarda with roasted sweet potato, toasted walnut, and blue cheese salad

I have to say that this is probably my favorite of everything I’ve tried from Blue Apron.  I would definitely make this again.  But, if I were to do it myself, I would use pork tenderloin instead of center cut, cut the salt entirely from the mostarda, and increase the amount of sweet potatoes in the salad.

I make! Turkey congee edition

You know how I roasted an entire turkey basically for myself a few weeks back, right?  And I’ve basically been subsisting off of turkey sandwiches since (not really)?  Well, I did make turkey stock which I then used to make turkey congee earlier this week.

Congee is a type of rice porridge eaten in Asia.  The type I made is more typical of the Hong Kong style, but I really like the Taiwanese style congee too.  I rather like having congee for breakfast in the winter (because otherwise it’s too hot) because it’s filling but not heavy.  And because I get to eat spicy pickled radish and preserved egg with it.  Also, because you can make it in a slow cooker and not have to worry about scraping the bottom of the pot so the rice doesn’t congeal and burn.  You set everything up at night before bed and in the morning, you have a warm pot of congee.  Yay!

Congee is pretty simple to make.  If you don’t have leftover rice (as is typically my case), you can start from uncooked rice.  You just need more liquid is all.  I prefer long grain rice for congee because of the resultant texture after cooking.  In this case, I used 1.5c (real cups and not those stupid rice cups) of raw, long grain rice, 2qt turkey stock, 1qt water, whatever turkey meat that I salvaged when making turkey stock, some ginger and green onions.  Everything goes into the slow cooker on low for about 8hr.  The next morning, dump in a few more pieces of ginger and more green onion and set it on high for 30min.  Done.

You can always switch up the stock to water ratio depending on what you have.  Or you can use all water.  I typically make this with chicken or fish, but I had all that turkey, you see.  And there are any number of add ins you could dump into the pot at the end.  It’s one of those pantry/fridge clearing things again.