Delivered Meals, Assembly Required

Love to chop but hate to shop? Don’t know where the grocery store is hiding its yuzu sauce? Does it have yuzu sauce? Tired of takeout? Restaurants OK but pricey? Work late? Blue Apron, one of several meal-kit services, may work for you, as it does for Debra Losada and Avery Danziger of Sharon. They are among the million people, it is said, to whom Blue Apron delivers meals every month.

Once a week, a refrigerated box containing the ingredients for three evening meals for two arrives, chilled, on their doorstep, wrapped in shiny silver paper with printed recipes for pinning on the wall above the stove. 

Tony and I, with delight, joined the Losada-Danziger household for dinner.

First, I have to say, this looked a lot like many informal little dinner parties. There was wine; there were candles; there was chatter, some of it intriguing. And talk of photographers Barbara Kasten and Martin Parr. And, of course, there was cooking. Losada (a painter, a framer too, and fine company as well) lines up the ingredients on a counter: 

4 salmon fillets; 8 Brussels sprouts, two Granny Smith apples, two lemons, two purple-top turnips, 2 Yukon gold potatoes, a bunch of Italian parsley, a couple of little tubs of French-style sweet butter and two teaspoons of yellow and brown mustard seeds — even a small brown paper bag for the peelings. 

The cook provides the knife skills, the olive oil, the salt and the pepper, except in the case where the recipe calls for Himalayan pink salt. That comes in the box.

So, let the chopping begin. Because Losada may not get home until 7 p.m., Danziger starts prepping the food: washing the vegetables, dicing or slicing them, setting up tools to peel lemons or to shave vegetables or cheese with a microplane and sharpening his handsome chef’s knife, the one with a slightly melted handle. Stuff happens in the kitchen.

The recipe figures 10 minutes for preparation, but Danziger says it takes him 30 minutes because he likes to talk and drink a beer at the same time.

Still, this solves a nagging problem for many shoppers. “I buy too much,” Losada tells me. The surplus just turns unrecognizable in a refrigerator corner. One of the things she really loves about Blue Apron is that there are no leftovers.

So. Butter in the pan and cook the diced apples. Danziger, a photographer, looks like a pretty good cook, too. “My parents had five restaurants. It’s in my blood,” he says. His grandfather was a confectioner to Emperor Franz Joseph and was famous in Vienna for his glazed fruits (Read all about it in “Papa D, A Saga of Love and Cooking.”) So this Danziger is handy making a vinaigrette with the mustard seeds, salt and pepper, butter and lemon juice. Finally, time to sear the salmon and serve with autumnal vegetables and the apples. We sit down. We dig in to the delicious food. We have another glass of wine. We have a very good time.

For details on Blue Apron menus, plans, prices and special offers for new customers, go to www.blueapron.com. Although Blue Apron started in New York City in 2012, the company now has warehouses and suppliers of meat, fish, vegetables and condiments all over the country. Just type your zip code into the Blue Apron site and it will tell you if they can deliver three meals a week for two (for roughly $60) or two meals a week for four (about $70 a week) to your door. Delivery is free. You can also order bottles of wine chosen for the meals you select; enough cutlery, tools, pots and pans to open a restaurant of your own; and, of course, a cookbook.