In many ways I feel like I’m still searching for my 2018 mojo, but I’m about to kick start my fitness plans for the year at least. I decided to sign up for the “Transformation Challenge” at my local Orange Theory. It starts on Monday and runs through the end of March. I have to workout there at least 3 times each week, and there are prizes at the end for the people who lose the biggest percentage of their body weight.
I already know I won’t be eligible for prizes because there’s one week (when I go to QuiltCon) when I already know I won’t be able to make 3 workouts. There’s an OTF in Pasadena, but unfortunately going to another location doesn’t count. But I decided to sign up anyway because 1) I want the built-in motivation for a couple months and 2) it’s pretty unlikely that I’d win a prize in the first place, so not being eligible doesn’t bother me. In previous challenges, the winners usually lose something like 10% or more and that would be almost 20 pounds for me. Doable, I suppose, but my goal is really more like 10 pounds.
Losing 10 would put me back at my pre-pregnancy weight (both pre-Emma and pre-Charlotte) and I’d be pretty darn satisfied with that.
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My friend Karen sent me a free box from Plated, one of the many meal services that are so popular these days. I’ve been wanting to try one of these, but just haven’t gotten around to it — plus, I’m just not sure how well this kind of thing would work for our family.Can the meals really be prepared in 45 minutes or less? Will the kids eat them? We shall see! The options all looked pretty delicious to me, so fingers crossed.
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Last Saturday I managed to lock our whole family out of the house. Yep. We were on our way to my work group’s holiday party (we’ve made a habit of having our holiday parties in January for the last several years) and Jose and the girls were already outside. I twisted the doorknob lock and pulled the door closed behind me, assuming Jose had the keys. He…did not. He tried to stop me as the door was swinging closed, but it was too late.
At least the weather wasn’t too bad, and we had our phones! I called an emergency locksmith, who was at our door a half hour later. It took him a good 15-20 minutes to get inside, and he had to remove a small piece of trim to get a better angle on things, so I guess that’s a good sign at least — our lock was difficult to crack!
We’ve been in this house for 18 months now, and have said at least half a dozen times that “oh, we should give a key to the neighbors”…and yet we hadn’t. Needless to say, that has now been done.
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Charlotte has had goop coming out of one ear for two days now, so she’s got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon for what I’m sure is another ear infection. This winter has been really rough with the illnesses.
I also just feel cold all the time. I guess 15 years is the point at which I finally become Houston-ified enough that even a 50 degree day leaves me shivering? All I know is that as crazy as this sounds, I could really go for an oppressively hot summer day right now.
I’m been using Blue Apron pretty consistently for about a year. Meals take 30-45 minutes (especially if you read the directions first and make sure to do things in parallel — e.g.. all the directions start with chopping but you can actually chop some things while other things cook) (some say they take 45 minutes, but its really only 15-20 min of prep time, the rest is bake time). Its really nice just knowing I have three full meals of groceries in the fridge and no conversation about “what to make tonight.” The meals seem nice and well-rounded, there’s never any leftovers but we’re always full when we’re done eating. We’ve been impressed by the freshness of the ingredients but I will say slightly annoyed that the produce tends to be focused on cheaper produce (e.g. there are more meals made with squash, greens, potatoes, and carrots than ones made with peppers tomatoes avocado or more expensive produce – the produce is supposed to be seasonal and I wrote Blue Apron a nasty-gram last summer about the lack of meals with summer tomatoes!). We’ve gotten really good about selecting from their options for the most satisfaction — e.g. their basic meat/potato dishes are pretty bland so we tend to avoid them, anything they have with dough (quiche, pizza, calzones, etc.) is amazing, anything Asian or medit. spiced is amazing.
Karen recommended Plated and we’ve been talking about alternating between the two depending on what that week’s options are, lots of people do that. I had a Plated meal with Karen when I visited last time and it was very good. We tried doing that with hello fresh but have not consistently liked it as much as Blue Apron.
If you want, I can send you three free meals with Blue Apron too so you can compare and contrast. Just send me what email address you want to send it to.
In any case, maximize your discounts. For instance you can buy Blue Apron cards through Costco that reduces the per-meal price quite a bit. I think there are similar things for Plated.
(Also I will point out I have a friend with teens and she found Blue Apron was really useful to teach them to cook because it comes with how-to videos, etc. and all the ingredients and instructions are there so they would prepare meals together or alternately they would cook when they got home from school. Something to think about in, I dunno, 10 years from now :))
45 minutes seems like a very long time to cook dinner. I typically spend 15 to 30 (for prep – not counting bake time), and we do our dinners from scratch. Granted, it’s not exactly fine cuisine around here.
Also, it’s 67 in Houston right now!
I am assuming that the 35-45 minute estimate includes cook/bake time and is not entirely hands-on. (Becca said in her comment that Blue Apron is like that.) If it’s all busy time that would definitely be a deal breaker! Our meals are usually 15-30 min prep as well. Or even less in the case of hot dogs + macaroni.
You haven’t warmed up yet from your week in Charlotte
BTW I’m cold all the time too, Winter and with AC in summer 
It is definitely a longer prep time than easy stuff – pasta/sauce or hot dogs/mac & cheese or throwing some nuggets in the oven would definitely be faster than anything Blue Apron offers. But its not like a massive complicated prep either. Roughly, the recipes follow certain basic structures: chop 3-4 vegetables or spices; maybe mix a sauce /dressing in a small bowl; sautee or pan-sear something, and maybe a bake or boil step that you are not actively involved in. The only ingredients it expects you to have at home are olive oil (Jen!) and salt and pepper.
Blue Apron at least tells you the prep times when you select your meals (you get 8 to choose from) and there are always 1-3 meals labeled “fast prep” (under 30 minutes.) Looking at the selections, just randomly, for next week, there’s only one labeled “fast prep” – its a Korean rice cake sautee and it looks fast because you chop three vegetables (carrots, celery, broccoli) and then basically throw it all in the sautee pan with some eggs, rice cakes, black bean sauce and marinade. There’s also a french bread pizza to select which is not labeled “fast prep” because it lists prep time as 45 minutes, but it bakes for 30 minutes, and the recipe looks like it would take 10-15 minutes max of activity to prep including a small 3 ingredient side salad that you would put together while the pizza is baking. On the “long” end of that set of 8 recipes is a a seared chicken and pan sauce that’s listed as 35-45 minutes and the recipe looks like you’d be doing something that entire time between cooking vegetables, cooking the chicken, and cooking the sauce. All the rest of the recipes are in between those extremes. One thing about blue apron is that the recipe instructions are set up, in most cases, to use one pan. If you use two pans and cook things at the same time instead if sequence, that can speed things up. I will say we have gotten faster and its easier for us to figure out which recipes are time sinks now than when we first started using it last year — and I am faster at preparing the same meal than Byron is, because he’s a literalist at following the directions where I read them before starting and then rearrange them to make them more time efficient.
So what’s the advantage of Blue Apron over doing your own cooking? You don’t have to grocery shop and plan the meals? It sounds like in terms of actual prep / cooking, it’s not saving you a lot of time.
So I guess it depends on where you are as a family.
Byron and I have always done our own cooking, but sometimes we’ve let it get out of control (2 hr prep time in some cases), we also fell into a cycle of kind of the same ten meals or so over and over and it was getting boring, and between grocery trips it would fall into this frustrating pattern: I would come home from work and the conversation would be thirty minutes of deciding what to have for dinner and then Byron spending 30 minutes at the grocery store, inevitably resulting in us not eating until 9 pm. Now no deciding besides “which of these three recipe cards shall we cook” and no last minute trips to the grocery store.
Anyway, Blue Apron has us eating different meals than our usual meals and has taken the last minute grocery runs out of the equation. We don’t do Blue Apron every week (and sometimes stretch one week of meals over two weeks) and we still grocery shop and go through our meal planning too, but its not so much of a chore because we fill in the gaps with Blue Apron.
I think for a lot of families that don’t cook or only eat insta-type meals the big advantage is it gets them cooking.
Byron would like to chime in and say he’s not sure Blue Apron is economical for a family of 4 because of the way its priced. Its something like $9 per serving ($7 with costco). When cooking for 2, well, we probably would spend that anyway in groceries (or pretty close). But when cooking for 4, grocery shopping to prepare the same meals is probably cheaper because the way ingredients scale. I will say, I’ve always considered myself reasonably good at cooking — but Blue Apron has taught me a lot about portioning that I think I now consider when grocery shopping. Sometimes, for instance, they will send a meal with ONE potato or ONE carrot to split with both portions. I’ve never cooked with one potato in my life (in fact I always default to cooking 4-6 portions always generating leftovers)! But every time they’ve done this, the ingredients they send are more than ample for the recipe. Now when I grocery shop I do scale back a little of what I buy based on what I’ve learned here..
Oh my God. It is the winter of plagues for sure. The month of December was full of sickness and now it seems we’re all in it again. Sending you strength!
Thanks — and same to you! And you’ve got a teeny baby — hang in there!