Teach Your Kids to Cook Using Blue Apron

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'll discuss using Blue Apron as a Culinary school in a box for your kids. 

I would like my kids to be competent cooks.  They are 13 and 15.  I'm not looking for next contestant on MasterChef Junior, but I want them to be able to find their way around a kitchen and make some reasonable meals.

To this end, I have tried a bunch of systems with varying degrees of success starting when they were in early elementary school.  Let's see if I can remember some of the highlights: I joined a monthly mail away cooking club that sent these adorable cookbooks and little kid-sized kitchen implements, I created a summer cookbook for the kids to work through with easy recipes for lunch, I've signed them up for pricey classes at our local culinary school, I assigned them weekly nights to sous chef for me, and most recently, I implemented a Kids in the Kitchen Night once a month where they took over the kitchen and cooked dinner jointly -- chaos and arguing ensued.  The last idea wasn't bad, but it required:

1) scheduling a night when both kids were available between 5-7pm (almost impossible during the fall and spring) 

2) getting the kids to come up with a menu with ingredients (so difficult, you'd think I was asking them to pull their fingernails out one at a time) and 

3) obtaining all of the ingredients and recipe printouts in time for meal and 

4) refereeing the "night of" arguments when my son inevitably would not pull his weight and my daughter would lose her mind. Sigh.  

It's true that sometimes I can will things into happening just by sheer determination, but this took so much effort, time, and preplanning that it was inevitably doomed to fail. 

Enter Blue Apron. I need to give credit for this idea to my friend Stephanie who has 2 daughters who love to cook and who prepare meals weekly for their family.  Well, I don't have those kind of cheerful go-getters in my house -- and I'm guessing that if you are watching this video, you may not either.  I've always been skeptical about Blue Apron for regular meals because 1) I already love to cook and make new things and 2) I'm super cheap. It's never been worth it to me to pay basically a 100% premium to have someone else do the creative thinking and prep work for me. 

HOWEVER, based on the effort and prep involved in my Kids in the Kitchen night, all of a sudden, that premium was beginning to sound worth it -- if it meant I could actually keep this system going and as a result, my kids would become more proficient cooks.  

So, here's what I do:

• Sign up - I signed up for Blue Apron.  If you know someone who is already using this service, have them send you a coupon. There are 4 people in my family, so I chose the Family Plan and the minimum number of meals per week, which is 2. 
• Review your Meals - once you've signed up, go into the Upcoming area to see what they are about to send you.  If you hit the "Change" button, they will give you 4 options to choose from. I try to choose the 2 most kid-friendly options.  More on that later. 
• Schedule meals - having my kids cook meals together was a bad idea: they fought, my son learned nothing, and it was impossible to find time on our calendar. So, this time I'm doing one kid makes one meal. That is so much easier to schedule. Just make sure you do it within 4-5 days of the delivery so that the food is still fresh. 
• Cancel deliveries - by default, Blue Apron delivers weekly. That is way too frequent for me. We are doing once a month during the school year and probably more like every two weeks during the summer. In order to do this, you have log in and skip deliveries since they don't give you a less frequent option.  Go back into the Upcoming area and this time hit the Manage button. You can change the delivery date or just skip. Plan to log in once a week to do this. You have to do this well in advance of the delivery -- like a week prior, but once you establish a routine it's not so bad. 
• Preprepped - when your order arrives, it is a culinary school in a box. It is truly lovely. The ingredients are prepackaged in specific amounts and the knick-knack bag is super appealing with little pats of butter, tiny bottles of vinegar and other cute sundries. And the best part is that the instructions are glossy, mid-beginner level, and have step by step photos. Perfect as a training tool. 

So how's it working?  So far, so good!  My kids are very different in terms of their interest in cooking and therefore their skill levels, so the first time we did this my 13 year old daughter made Stir-fried Chicken and Udon Noodles. She listened to music and worked happily with very little involvement on my part and got dinner on the table in about 90m. My 15 year old son, on the other hand, made Chinese Five-Spice Salmon with Roasted Cauliflower and Mashed Sweet Potatoes and needed CONSTANT supervision and hand holding.  He kept wandering out of the kitchen with all of the gas burners on. Yeesh. But somehow managed to get dinner on the table in about 2 hours. 

A couple of things to note: 

• Supervise - Until they are better trained, I block that time off to be available to do things like teach them knife skills and watch the burners. I don't think of this as time off for me -- and remember, it will take them 2 to 3 times longer to make dinner on average.  
• Yuck! - They have to make the meal whether they like the ingredients or not. Although I try to match the meal with the kid, it's just too difficult to always get it right. And you don't have unlimited options with Blue Apron. And frankly, I've found that they are more willing to try something if they've made it, so maybe it will have the additional positive benefit of expanding their palates. 
• Recycling - if you are at all environmentally conscious, you'll be appalled at the Blue Apron packaging. I recycle as much as I can (and there are instructions on their website), but right now I'm choosing to overlook this part for the training benefits. 

This works out for us to about $35 a night for a Blue Apron meal.  Less than eating out, but easily twice as much as a regular home cooked meal. Again, I'm too cheap to do this normally, but I consider it an educational expense -- like a cooking tutor.  Plus we get to eat the finished product!

Let me know what YOU think.  Leave your experiences and thoughts in the comments section and thanks for watching!