On New Years Eve, while half drunk, I decided to make a New Year’s Resolution: I would cook one meal, on average, every week, in 2019.
I didn’t have a firm plan for this, but the reasoning was simple: I needed to eat in more, order in less. I had spent entirely too much time since we moved from a household of four to a household of three ordering food in. I had never really learned how to cook, and I wanted to learn to do that, and feed the family.
In the past 6 months, I have cooked 45 meals from Blue Apron – ranging as high as 4 in one week. During that time, only one meal I’ve ordered has gone to waste because of failing to prep it in time before the ingredients went bad. (I had failed to cancel a set of orders when I was going to be out of town for half the week.) I have also cooked two other meals that weren’t from Blue Apron – repeating a Blue Apron menu.
By any standard of drunkenly-declared New Year’s Resolutions, this one has been a rousing success.
I am now more comfortable in the kitchen with chopping and where things are. I’m better at prep, and have started getting a sense of how much spice various members of my family can handle, and have even gone so far as to do some minor spice substitutions in dishes to make them more paletable to other family members. I have gone from not even knowing where the salt and pepper in my house is to going through enough to run out of both and need to buy more. (I don’t think I’ve ever bought more of a spice because I ran out before – a new experience for me!)
Blue Apron’s ongoing variety is definitely helpful here. Having the meals keep coming unless I take specific action is helpful. The meals are tasty: my daughter has even been asking me to go back and make some of them again, in some cases for weeks after making them the first time. It’s overall been a great experience.
I’ve even learned to start thinking about how I plate my food, and paid more attention to this when I go out to restaurants and such. I’ve ended up making a bunch of different foods: everything from steaks to meatballs, from tilapia to freekah. The meals have been varied enough to stay interesting and consistent enough that I’ve learned a bunch of techniques for cooking that have helped me.
There’s still more to do: I have not yet gotten to a point where I’m ready to move off of Blue Apron. Over the past couple weeks, I had taken time off from Blue Apron, hopoing to get out to the grocery store and buy ingredients for cooking on my own. That effort failed: instead, I simply did not cook. I need to find ways to make more things Jess enjoys: she’s generally less willing to try things out than Julie is, so finding ways to make food she’ll enjoy is hard.
But overall: I’ve been cooking, and it works, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished so far.
(At some point I’ll get back to recording my antics; for a bunch of technical reasons, that has fallen by the wayside, and I do want to get back to updating the YouTube channel now that I’m more comfortable with getting meals on the table.)