A (new to me) tool

Are you familiar with Pepperplate? It's an online recipe tool that lets you import recipes from a whole slew of sites or you can copy & paste your own recipes if you've got them either in soft copy or on a blog (like I do).

Then it will generate a shopping list, based on the recipes you select. You can arrange the shopping list so it matches the order in which you shop.

We just started using it and wow, I'm liking it so far. Although I can't import my recipes from my private recipe site, I was able to copy and paste them. It could not be easier.

I think this will replace Blue Apron for us. We liked the food and we liked trying new recipes, but it was sometimes awkward timing to get three meals' worth of food when really we had time to cook eggs. Pepperplate looks like it will give us some of the convenience we're looking for, without so much overhead.

If you try it, let me know what you think.

Blue Apron—a review

Warning—lots of photos ahead

Have you heard of Blue Apron? You can read about it here, but basically it’s a subscription food service that delivers the ingredients for three meals ready to be cooked. My friend Magpie was given a week’s worth of service from Blue Apron but she forgot to cancel so ended up having it for a second (maybe third) week. So Blue Apron gave her a week of free meals to give to a friend; when she asked around, I raised my hand.

The recipes this week

Kent and I have talked about the rut we tend to get in when planning meals. Neither of us have much energy during the week to cook involved dishes, even though we both like to cook a lot. So we will cook several meals on Sunday and then fill in with quick hits like omelets (which I learned to make like a champ from my grandmother) or something similarly quick. They're tasty meals and fill us up just fine but after a while, we’re bored. When we’re bored is when we order carry out sushi or just flat go out and that’s not necessarily good for either our budget or our bulges.

So the idea of Blue Apron interested us both. Our delivery came Friday and Kent’s cooked up two of the meals today—we just finished one and the other one is in the fridge for later this week. We still have a third meal to fix, spiced meatballs with garlic toast and summer squash salad.

All the food

First thing: You get everything you need to make the three dishes, and the food is fresh. The produce looked amazing as did the salmon and chicken. The Thai basil was wonderful, and the paper bags have tiny plastic bottles with screw top lids that hold the red wine vinegar and ponzu sauce.  Our three meals are:

• Spiced meatballs
• Stir-fried ginger basil chicken
• Seared salmon and panzanella

The food comes slightly prepped. For example, the salmon had been skinned and the chicken for the second dish was diced, and everything was already measured. You still need to chop, cut, etc. but that's only to be expected. Kent—who is quite handy in the kitchen—thought that some of the prep time given might be a little optimistic. The chicken dish prep time was listed as 15 minutes but took more like 20. We'll see how the meatball dish goes.

Plated!

Tonight we had the salmon and I would change only one part of it. The salad portion has croutons in with the tomatoes and corn but to my mind it wasn't needed. In fact, Kent only made half the croutons which still seemed like a lot, and we ate the rest of the bread (which had been baked with olive oil and then rubbed with a clove of garlic) as a side dish.

We got to try some things we haven't been able to get here before, like the Thai basil. The peppers in the salmon dish were shishito peppers, which neither of us have heard of and they were perfect for the dish. Also heirloom cucumbers, which we've wanted to try but can't get here.

More photos:

Chicken stir fry

Salmon dish ingredients

Salmon dish salad

Net/net, we like this well enough to try a few more weeks. Thanks, Magpie!

Days 9 and 10

Day 9 

I am so very glad Kent and I can cook and moreover that we enjoy cooking. I was thinking about that at lunch yesterday. I'd reluctantly gone out to lunch with some co-workers and my reluctance wasn't about the company but about not having my own yummy lunch that I bring every day. And a tiny bit of it was also that if I'm going to spend money eating out, I'd rather do it at dinner, with Kent.

Anyway -- we do love to cook, and even when we get in cooking ruts (we are in a pizza rut right now), it's still really good food, it's far cheaper than eating out and it's almost certainly healthier too.


At the risk of sounding very shallow, Day 10's topic of gratitude is . . . my car. Yes, yes, I know. An inanimate thing! And yet I love my car so very much.

I got the Volvo just over a year ago and I got it because I felt really unsafe in the Fit (you may remember I'd gotten hit by another car, well actually the other car's door). My Volvo isn't a lot bigger than the Fit was but it's sure heavier. I'm confident that if someone opened his door in traffic the way it did when my Fit got so damaged that the door-opener's car would suffer more. In the case of the Fit, it barely damaged his car.

I've never loved a car before. I liked my CR-V a lot, it was the first car I'd had that had power everything and I loved that the car sat up a bit higher. But it was green with a khaki interior and that just never felt like me. Plus it was humongous, at least to me. But it was roomy, handled well in snow and ice and it served me well for nearly 10 years.

This Volvo, though, is just amazing. The seats are so comfy (and heated! and NOT leather!) and it's unusual looking but not a freak show car, and my MP3 player works in it and -- well I could go on and on but why? You get the idea.

I guess the true upside of me falling in love with a car is at least now I get it when other people wax poetic about their own vehicles. I'm not judging them now.

A nifty trick

I use broth a lot in the recipes I cook, because it adds good flavor without a lot of calories or fat. But I refuse to buy broth any more. Store-bought broth is expensive and can be high in sodium. Plus I don't know how it's made. With my broth, there's no added salt or any sort of preservative. But making broth takes time and I don't care for the texture of the meat when it's been basically boiled all day long.

Last week, I learned a new way to cook the bird. My daughter-in-law, Jen, puts a whole chicken in her slow cooker and roasts it all day (or all night) long. She doesn't add any water, which surprised me at first. But really, it's just like roasting a bird in the oven, only at a lower temperature. Once the bird is cooked, she picks the meat off and makes stock with the carcass. What I really like is that this method means I can put the bird in the slow cooker and go do other things. Plus using a whole bird is a lot cheaper than using chicken pieces.

Here's my first slow-cooker chicken:

As soon as the chicken cools, I'll be taking the meat off the bone for other meals and then making broth of my own. This chicken probably had a lot of water injected into it, because there's a lot of water/juicy stuff in the slow cooker. So this may turn out more like a boiled chicken after all, but I hope not. And if it does, well I'll try again with better chicken.