We are horrible at home cooking. Not that our food tastes bad (to us it’s amazing), but we know 10 recipes that we use all the time, and eating the same thing every two weeks gets old pretty quick. And when we don’t want to cook one of those ten, we end up eating out.. like A LOT! So this ‘tip’ is a delicious way to mix things up a little.

Blue Apron is a company that sends you a 3 delicious meals weekly. You choose from 6 different meal options, perfectly portioned out for the number of people in your household. And when I say perfectly portioned, I mean really small containers with 2 Tablespoons of sesame seed oil, or a quarter stick of butter (We’ve even gotten leftovers of some things like garlic, and onions!). All meals include everything you need except for water, salt & pepper, and olive oil. And you get to decide which weeks you want to order for. So, if you didn’t really like the options for next week, or were going to be out of town, you just log in, click to skip the week, and voila! Insider tip, we go through and skip all the weeks available, and then when we have the time to look at a calendar, we go through the options, and choose the weeks we know we are in town, and the weeks we like our meal options.

The weeks are automatically selected to have food delivered, so be aware. They normally have 6 weeks of meals online at a time, so you can look ahead to see what meals are coming, & decide which weeks you think look the best. For us, the big selling point is convenience because working full time jobs along with our photography dream means we come home pretty tired, and though we LOVE to cook, we are not very inclined to plan a meal, go to the grocery store, and then come back and cook it.

It costs ten dollars per person, per meal, per week. That’s a lot of “per’s” so in English, Laura & I pay $60 every week for six meals. And when you consider that eating out probably costs at least $30 for us as a couple (and that’s without a pint), It works out to be quite affordable. A bottle of home-brewed beer and a blue apron meal is cheaper than a dinner for two out on the town. Now, we definitely aren’t saying to give up eating out, because we LOVE doing that,  but maybe rotate weeks around like we do, and get meals for 1 or 2 weeks per month. We’ll never pass an opportunity for a date night out, but a meal in, cooked together makes for a great date night in.

If you read our blog last week, you know that we bet choices, the most common one is dinner, and this takes making that choice right out the window because we’ve already made the choices weeks ago, and we only had 6 to choose from. The meals are also consistently different. There is always a vegetarian option, and the meals become a great addition to your own meal library. The instructions you get to prepare the meal are clear, and have the amounts of all the ingredients so if you wanted to replicate it, you could easily! And not to mention the helpful pictures that go along with it… We feel like we’re on the food network!