Last week, I cooked my 6th Blue Apron meal: Calabrian Shrimp and Orzo. Overall evaluation: this meal was good, but as our fifth of six Blue Apron meals so far centered around pasta + zucchini, we are looking forward to some new ingredients in the next couple recipes – even if they do include kale.
You can see the video of the process on YouTube:
Some quick takeaways:
- For the first time, I actually used too much salt in a dish. As I’m new to cooking, I’m still learning how much of something is the right amount of something, so this was a bit of an exciting lesson for me.
- I was able to use a bit of the spice for seasoning without making it inedible for my spice-averse daughter; this is good.
- I made a couple silly mistakes with placement of food in the pans/timing that slowed me down and didn’t help make better food.
- We’re really done with Zucchini.
The dish was straightforward to cook – though I’ll admit that I didn’t know how to quarter + de-seed a lemon in the right way. We went through all of it, and my daughter would have happily eaten more. Neither capers nor zucchini are her favorite foods, which means she ended up picking around a lot of those, which reduces the overall yield of food we get. On another day, this might have actually been an issue with having my daughter not be full, but thankfully I was a pretty light eater today, so she was able to finish off mine to satisfy her hunger.
This was my first time using orzo. It cooks pretty much like any other pasta, and it didn’t give me too much trouble. It was a bit harder to test whether it was “done”: it’s more like a rice than most pastas, so they’re small individual pieces that are kind hard to test.
Overall, my daughter’s comment was “I wish there was more shrimp and orzo, and less zucchini and capers – but I would eat it again anyway.” From such a picky eater, I considered this a win!
Missing Skill: One thing I did not learn how to do, though I did watch a video later: I did not know how to de-seed a lemon. I found out later that the way to quarter the lemon was not to merely cut vertically and horizontally, but instead to cut through two vertical slices, which would have made the process easier. Something to keep in mind for future lemon wedge slicing!
