What can I say about the month of January, other than it’s usually my least favorite month of the year?! As per usual, we battled colds, sniffling our way through the dreary winter month, and cooked a lot at home while keeping ourselves quarantined off from the rest of the world. Basically, January = resting and recovering from all the holiday celebrations the months prior!
This month with Blue Apron gave us some pretty hearty meals, with a lot of very unique flavors.
Spicy Ginger Chicken Tacos
You say tacos, and we’ll be there! Tacos are the ultimate comfort food for me (well, other than my beloved burritos), and these ginger chicken tacos were certainly among some of the more unique flavor profiles I’ve encountered for this dish. The ginger was the star flavor, with not much else in the tacos other than some purple cabbage slaw. The tzatziki sauce did provide a nice cooling element to the punch that you get from the spice and ginger, but I did find myself wanting something more in the tacos other than chicken and slaw. Still can’t quite put my finger on it.
The curry-roasted potatoes were fantastic, even though they totally stained one of our sheet pans that we baked them on! Note: use aluminum foil if you want to save your pans.
Chicken & Fresh Basil Fettucine
I love when Blue Apron sends fresh pasta for their pasta dishes! Not only is cook time faster, it has great texture and delivers in the flavor department (bonus points on this week’s meal for being basil-flavored!). This dish is tomato-sauced based, but goat cheese was added to impart a nice creamy element to the pasta (not only for texture/taste, but it also gives it that pretty creamy red color). I almost thought zucchini being the only vegetable in the dish would leave something amiss but everything worked out just fine!
Our Variations
We added some pepper flakes to the dish to make it a little spicy as we feel that always enhances dishes, especially tomato-sauced based pastas.
Pork Roast & Balsamic-Shallot Pan Sauce
These pork roast dishes keep surprising me! As someone who has just recently gotten back into eating meat (I was primarily a pescatarian for about 8 years), I am always pleasantly surprised at how much I like the pork roast dishes from Blue Apron. Of course, my husband is a great cook when it comes to meat so I have him to thank for making sure the meat is cooked appropriately.
The generous amount of broccoli was roasted, and then mixed in with farro and Peruvian pickled peppers, laying the base for the plate, topped with the perfectly-cooked pork roast. The star here, however, was the balsamic-shallot pan sauce that brought acidity from the shallots, and a little sweetness from the balsamic. The perfect bite included a little bit of goat cheese. Impressive.
Spicy Honey-Lime Chicken Tostadas
Carb alert! Flour tortillas, zesty lime rice, and sweet honey beans all in one? Yep! I’ve been loving all the dishes with the beans that have a little bit of honey mixed in them (more on that from last month). and they are a really good example about how sweet compliments the savory. These chicken tostadas were a bit on the simple side and if I made them again, I would add some veggies like sliced avocado, diced tomato, and shredded lettuce to give it some fresh elements. FYI, two tostadas are VERY filling!
Our Variations
We omitted the carrots from the dish as my husband is not a huge fan of them.
Shrimp and Orzo Pasta
I love to try all the different Mediterranean dishes from Blue Apron because it really reflects a diet that I prefer to follow – seafood, lean meats like chicken, and lots of fresh veggies (and of course, there’s pasta too…who can resist that?). This shrimp and orzo pasta dish was extremely light even though orzo is a style of pasta. I felt great after eating it as I wasn’t overstuffed, and the tomato sauce with the shrimp was flavor dynamite. The feta cheese added a nice salty element to the sauce, and the lemon came in to add a tiny bit of acidity. Lemon with seafood is always a winner though!
If I could eat more meals like this every week, I totally would!
Spicy Salmon & Orange Relish
Here’s another great example of Mediterranean cooking – fresh fish with lots of veggie elements and a side of couscous. A note about the salmon, though: when we originally signed up with Blue Apron a couple of years ago, the salmon was all wild. Now, we’ve been receiving farmed salmon which we do not like to eat – ever. So, we will likely not be selecting the salmon meals going forward until they can bring back the good stuff. Too bad!
Back to the dish – I actually think the best part was not the salmon, but the salsa verde couscous filled with zucchini and peppers, and finished off with delicious marinated oranges and sweet peppers. I totally would have been cool eating just a bowl of that without the salmon!
That’s it for January! Stay tuned for February – it’s gonna be a good one! So far, we’ve definitely made the best recipes of our Blue Apron “career” and I’m excited to share my favorites.
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