Yeah, I just checked and 80% ground beef is $5/pound here. The ultra-fancy grass-fed or pat lafrieda brisket/shortrib blends are $8/pound. Of course that’s delivered to my door with a smile, I’m not gonna go to a supermarket myself. How gauche!
But one pound of beef is 4 burgers, that’s enough meat to comfortably feed 2 people.
That is also 4 burger not just 2. I do get your point though even if I fall firmly in Armando’s camp and have no problem with leftovers (either just eating the same meal again or multiple different meals from one basic prep session).
With our youngest moving on to college in the fall we’ve thought about these services just to have a meal a week that we don’t have to plan. If we had better options to eat out around here we might just do that but we aren’t holding out for interesting food in our small town.
If you’re in a small town these services will dramatically expand your dining options. But you do have to cook them yourself, and clean-up afterwards.
Just to pile on, Skip, but that really is a minimum of 4 giant burgers; toss in 3 bucks worth of potatoes for baked fries or mashed potatoes or what have you and you’re barely scraping $5/person/meal ;-)
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I can absolutely prepare a one-off dish for my gf and I that runs close to $40 (esp. if we can toss in a bottle of wine). But it’s far and away the exception, not the norm, and I would like to think my contributions to the cooking thread illustrate that I do not suffer from a limited # of food options :)
Not trying to pick you on in particular, but aside from the “learning how to cook weird new stuff without going to the trouble of Googling how” and “I live in the sticks and don’t have access to cumin” situations, these meal prep services strike me as a pretty terrible deal no matter how you slice it.
It’s not about being too lazy to google, it’s being exposed to new ingredients and techniques. For example, I never cook seafood at home because I made seared shrimp adobo over butter lettuce a couple years ago and while it was delicious, my apartment smelled fishy for weeks afterwards.
Back when I did Blue Apron two years or so ago they sent me a meal of seared salmon with preserved lemons. I never would have made fish at home, and I had never used preserved lemons before. But you know what, it came out delicious, it didn’t stink, and now I make it myself on occasion.
They are certainly an expensive luxury product, no doubt about that. But they do have some value.
Sorry, that was probably unnecessarily antagonistic, but I’ve more or less taught myself to cook a bewildering array of recipes and styles with nothing more than YouTube and Google at my side. I don’t think I possess any particularly innate talent; I’m just stubborn and fat :-D. I hadn’t even eaten plenty of that stuff before making it. Just got curious and went for it.
So to some extent, I can appreciate these services ability to introduce people to new foods and styles… But so could surfing reddit.com/r/food for five minutes a day! (that might be an oversimplification)
I agree on the burger amount and onion. I sprung for a good onion there, they … are … awesome.
I think my point was not that we couldn’t do better, quite obviously I was picking and choosing what I would want on a burger. I think it was that sometimes you’ll have leftovers in odd amounts. I makes for bad math unless you can really plan meals in bulk, something I do not do well. Based on that list, I’d probably have two burgers/buns left, leftover tomatoes, lettuce and 1/2 an onion. So then … lunch the following day? That gets more in line with what @ArmandoPenblade said at $5 a meal.
I’m not springing for nice ground beef there either, that’s a sale price this weekend for the holiday.
The specifically proportioned ingredients are really the killer selling point for me. I too hate having weird partial leftovers lying around. But my solution has been to use recipes that make an amount of food that uses up full packages or units of anything that’s not easily stored (as opposed to dried spices or condiments or whatnot) and then eat the leftovers from that for several meals. Or on the handful of things where that’s tough (dairy, wine/beer), cook multiple things that use those ingredients in the same weekend. But mostly the former.
Oh sure, I get the appeal of the services. It doesn’t really make sense for me, given the range of groceries within easy distance of where I live, but I can understand why people use them. I was just taken aback by the $15 burger suggestion. I mean, there aren’t all that many restaurants that charge that much.
Huh? If you have leftover wine/beer, just drink it.
But wine and beer are gross.
Luckily, my gf disagrees, so I just have to cook with stuff she is willing to down on the weekends.
I’ll go the store on the way back and take stock of my typical burger buying menu. I don’t cook meat that much at home but when I do it’ll be sorta typical.
You might be able to drink that stuff, but it is nasty as fuck. I would sooner drink fish sauce.
If folks are interested in new stuff, one thing I’d also recommend is simply watching TV. The cooking competition shows, like Top Chef (on Bravo), Masterchef (Fox), Chopped (Food Network), etc. are very good for learning stuff. Then of course there are the specifically for teaching food shows where chef X tells you how to make dish Y. Quite useful.
Also, buy a FoodSaver or other type of vacuum sealer. This will vastly expand your ability to take advantage of great prices on proteins, in particular. See a great deal on tenderloin at Costco? Buy it, divide it into filets, and freeze. Stuff stays fresh for months.,
I mean if we’re doing savings comparisons, the hostess, myself, and the other cook bought enough food to produce KR BBQ for 20 (2x meals), breakfast for 20 (2x, albeit once just snacks), and Greek food for 20 (1x) with leftovers. I think total, we were in the hole about $400 for food and snacks, which works out to around $4/person/meal, but hey, that’s bulk cooking ;-)
Thanks for that write-up Olaf!
I’ve been switching between Blue Apron and Hello Fresh for the past 2-3 months. I’m NOT agile in the kitchen, nor in the market aisle thinking of ingredients or a recipe to cook. I spend a lot of time at work, have a wife and two kids who occupy almost all my other time, and I have to fritter away hours at Qt3 as well! I needed to save my marriage, with a busy wife who’s a great cook, but needs a partner in the kitchen. So I gave these services a shot. So far, my kids haven’t been big fans every week, there’ve been some hits but many recipes aren’t particularly targeted at kid’s palate. My wife and I, however, have loved the stuff from Blue Apron. Not cheap for home cooking, but way cheaper than eating out.
That said, I’m definitely going to put Blue Apron on hiatus and give Home Chef/Sun Basket a shot. I like that both of those services also seem to offer more menu choices each week.
I’ve not actually tried them yet. My coworker does. He speaks highly of them so it’s tempting. At least to try them.
To each his own, but that is an odd amount of ingredients for a burger (and most of it doesn’t look expensive). And much of those could be spread out across more than one meal with minimal planning (looks like ketchup there for instance, that’s $4 a bottle once a year). You aren’t going to get anything like that from a service either, you’re getting the generic burger they think everyone will like. So I don’t think that is a fair comparison.
As someone who cooks for one multiple times a week, I find the comments here to be a little bit exaggerated. Produce waste? Find a good store that sells things like carrots or potatoes individually. And even then, produce is cheap. Spices are expensive, but use stuff that you can use regularly so that $8 jar lasts months. Meat is also expensive, but for most things a pound of meat is 4 meals, at least. Chicken can be expensive, but stores like Costco help (and don’t buy boneless/skinless).
I can make a pot of chili for $40 with a ton of peppers, beans, etc, but that is 10 meals. Unless I am getting really fancy, most meals are about $3-4 a serving. Stopping at the grocery store isn’t that big of a deal for me either.
I completely understand why people would like these services, but let’s not pretend they are cheaper than cooking yourself. If you are willing to put a little bit of thought into it, it’s easy and cheap to cook for 1 or 2 people, and leftovers are great for nights you don’t want to cook. As far as recipes, there are so many good sites for recipes, I can’t imagine these services are offering something you can’t find online easily.
Another thing to mention…my wife has really enjoyed cooking these recipes from the delivery kits. They have increased her confidence in the kitchen to the point where she posts the finished product on various social media and gets a lot of likes or whatever the fuck.
Prior to these kits she cooked, but it was very simple recipes. The kits have given her confidence to prepare meals that she would have never thought to consider previously. And even if you cancel, you have the recipes and instructions to the point where you could prepare the meal again if you just went and purchased the ingredients.
Again, I’d strongly advise anyone that has never tried these services to at least trial them for a week. The initial discount makes it a can’t lose proposition.
