Jennifer's 365 Project

So another box (heavily discounted this time) of Blue Apron arrived today. Since we have company coming tomorrow (and will have leftovers from that) I dove right in tonight to bake the first dish, which was seared pork chops and plum salsa. Pretty tasty!

The big problem is Chris doesn't like any vegetables, so I end up with a ton of leftovers. If you cook three meals back to back that's a lot of veggie side dishes left over.

In the afternoon after Quinn's 2 1/2 hour long nap, we headed over to Heritage Park. They have a nice pond with ducks (and lots of duck poop), a path that loops around the pond and new playground equipment. Quinn especially liked the blue car there.
When we got home I made the next Blue Apron recipe for the week - Chicken and Buttermilk Biscuits. The biscuits didn't come out very pretty when I made them, but they were super tasty.

The recipe called for mayo and I absolutely refuse to eat mayo, so I substituted it with Greek yogurt which I suspect made the sandwich a little odd tasting. But not terrible. The collard greens and carrots slaw was tastier than I would have thought (I'm not a fan of vinegar or vinaigrette). Way too much vegetable for just me to eat, which Chris does not eat either of those. But tasty.

Quinn would not eat the vegetables either.

I liked the meatballs from last night more, but tonight's recipe was still pretty tasty. We even have leftovers. They sent chicken breasts and Chris and I usually eat chicken tenders, so we have a whole breast left over between the two of us.

Yesterday a shipment from Blue Apron came. I had a coupon for a free box so I used it about a week back. It's a service that basically puts together ingredients for meals and then ships you the food. Its probably perfect for couples who both work, enjoy some cooking, and have a fair amount of disposable income (subscriptions start at 60/week which is for 3 meals that feed 2 people).

So for dinner tonight after we got back from the zoo and running around, I started in on dinner.
The recipe I picked to cook first was Beef Albondigas. The first thing each recipe has you do is prepare everything at once. Chop all the vegetables, mix all the sauces, etc. Usually when I'm cooking I do it while I go and sometimes that leads to me burning something on the stove while I'm busy chopping up a veggie. Doing all the prep work ahead of time is a good habit I know I should get into.

Once of the nice things is that everything shipped is portioned to the meals for that week. So they sent a small amount of parsley, not a giant bunch of it that I wouldn't use all of. I really like that only because it's hard to get small enough amounts of some vegetables. Chris just doesn't like a lot of them but a whole bunch of spinach is too much for me to go through in a week.

Quinn was curious. Very, very curious. He's been helping me stir pancake batter and other things so he really wanted to help. But he's not quite old enough to chop things with knives.
Dinner came out much better than I thought. The recipe had a lot of onion in it and admittedly I picked a lot of it out once everything was mixed since I personally don't like onions. The meatballs has raisins in them and Chris ate them.

He even liked it.This is a victory (even if he didn't eat the squash).

I'm very impressed. This is not a recipe I thought I'd like to much and I did.