One of the elements of cooking that I’ve struggled with is that there’s been no good time, place, space, etc. where I can integrate shopping into my daily life. For many years, there was a grocery store that was on my path from work to home – at one point, literally across the street from the office I worked in – but that is not the case any longer. While there are a couple of specialty grocery stores within a 10 minute walk of my house – both a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods – the closest thing which is a “generic” grocery store really isn’t within walking distance, and certainly not on my way home.
However, I’ve re-started German classes – and with that, I’m now finishing class at 9:45PM on Mondays, and 1 block away in my path towards driving home, there’s a Star Market – a full grocery store – that is open until 11pm. This feels like a certain type of kismet to me.
One of the things I noted with Blue Apron is that I hope that it doesn’t become my only source of cooking long term: it’s pricy, and its recipes are fine, but nothing special. In the spirit of taking things one step at a time, I don’t feel the need to fix that all at once – I’m happy to start off with just making the change to buying the same thing, but from a grocery store instead.
With that goal in mind, I’ve set a goal for myself: the week of February 11th, rather than continuing with another Blue Apron meal, I will change it up: I will buy my own food, from a grocery store, and cook with that instead. While I’m at it, I’m going to make things interesting: I’m going to buy the same food as my first week of Blue Apron – Spiced Chicken with Spicy Orange Slaw and Spicy Beef Gnocchi – and compare the price as well.
Delivered from Blue Apron, these ingredients cost $48 for a total of four servings between the two meals: $10 per serving, plus a $8 shipping fee (which is flat regardless of how many servings you get). From a grocery store, I expect it to be different – but I don’t know exactly what will be different. I know it’ll be hard to find exactly the right sizes of some things, but even with that in mind, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to demonstrate that you can save money by doing the shopping yourself, if you have the opportunity to do so.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue cooking the next 2 weeks of meals that Blue Apron has coming my way – including this week’s Cumin-Sichuan Peppercorn Beef and Tuscan-style pork chops – while getting myself mentally prepared to go to the grocery store and actually buy groceries to make some meals.
