Tag Archives: Dinner

Dinner Conversation: Eggplant-less Parmesan and Healthy Donuts

Banana Bread Donuts from The Corner Kitchen Blog, via Greatist

Each week, we’ll round up posts, videos, and even playlists to entertain you while you cook, and provide conversation fodder for tonight’s Blue Apron dinner. Today we’re thinking about everything breakfast and talking about making the most of your nearly-empty pantry:

Keeping Meat and Vegetarians at Peace in the Kitchen – Kitchen Treaty
This sweet and useful advice for finding common ground in “multi-vore” couples and families suggets not freaking out about cooking tofu and meat in the same pan, plus gives tips about how to keep it fun in the kitchen when you and your partner eat different things.

Wake up to the Best Coffee – Yum Sugar
Demystify the coffee question with this look into the world of coffee makers. Do you need a French press, a Chemex, or an electric drip coffee pot? If you like to be as caffeinated as we do, you’ll want to know!

Baked Banana Donuts – Greatist
This recipe for adorable, morning-worthy sweets comes from Kelli Dunn, who wrote a fantastic review of us recently. Her recipe calls for no sugar or white flour, so even though these look like donuts, they’re much more worthy of your attention.

Fancy Pigs in a Blanket – Sweet Paul Magazine
A recipe for upping the ante on pigs in a blanket gives us hope that our favorite finger food will now be on the menu at every cocktail party we attend, no matter how fancy our hosts think they are.

No Eggplant? No Problem – Huffington Post Taste
Eggplant Parmesan without the eggplant? While this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, initially, by the time you’ve salivated over the images in this post, you’ll be down with the idea, too.

Here’s How: Make Dinner in One Pot

HERE’S HOW is a series where we share the best useful tips from our cooking adventures. We’ll answer questions before you have them and illuminate food mysteries with a blend of science and legend.

Making your whole supper in one pot can lead to extreme feelings of accomplishment. Not only can you brag, “I made that!” you’ll be able to say, “I made that all in one pot.” The after-dinner realization that you have only one dirty vessel to scour will also enhance the deliciousness of the meal you devoured.

Cooking in one pot has another perk as well. With each ingredient that you sauté, sear, or braise, you build up–and keep–tons of flavor. Rather than washing away the little brown bits that accumulate in the bottom of a pan as you brown chicken or onions, you incorporate those bits–known as sucs–into the finished product. And, did we mention you only have one pot to clean?

Next week’s Arroz Con Pollo is a prime example of the type of incredible flavor that results from mastering the one-pot format. Here’s how.

The Order

The very first ingredient should usually be the meat, chicken, or other protein. The idea here is that searing the chicken keeps the flavor of the meat inside while everything else cooks. Plus, the little bits of browning chicken that get stuck to the pan are the first step in building up the flavor.

After that, add ingredients by what cooks the longest. We actually remove the chicken to make space for the next bunch of ingredients, usually flavor-enhancing vegetables like onion, garlic, celery, or carrots. After that, it’s best to throw in any seasonings like spices or tomato paste or salt, then any grain being used with the liquid you’ll use to cook it. Finally, the protein goes back in and we pop a lid on it and cook everything until it’s done.

The Timing


In a one-pot meals, dinner is only as fast as its slowest ingredient. That timing establishes a baseline for when dinner will be done. Any tender but fast-cooking ingredients that should not be overcooked have to be stirred in towards the end. In the case of Arroz Con Pollo, the rice is the ingredient that takes the longest to cook through. But most of the vegetables here–carrots and onions–don’t suffer from being cooked for a while. Likewise, chicken thighs have moist meat that won’t dry out.

On the other hand, the peas, olives, and oregano are more delicate. We wait until only 5 minutes before the dish is done to throw them in. That way, they retain their flavor, freshness, and texture.

Serving Ideas

Many one-pot meals look best right when they’re finished cooking. This means you don’t have to worry about arranging your casserole, stew, or hash in a serving platter, meaning this isn’t “one pot, one serving dish,” but really just one pot. You can set the pot right on the table for a rustic presentation (put it on a trivet or potholder so you don’t leave a burn mark). Garnish with some fresh torn herbs. Then dole our portions into your plates or bowls from there. Enjoy every bite knowing how few dishes await.

Got questions about any of the techniques in our recipes? Leave a comment or shoot us a tweet and we’ll answer your question in an upcoming post.

Dinner Conversation: Strawberries in Season and Foods You’re Eating Wrong

Strawberry Shortcakes for Two from Heather’s Dish

How To Eat Cupcakes Better – Daily Dot

The One Food You Would Eat For the Rest of Your Life – Quora

Strawberry Shortcake for Two – Heathers Dish

Rhubarb and Strawberry Compote – Umami Girl

  • An in-season cooking project for a sweet pot of jam. If Blue Apron dinners have you craving more time in the kitchen, we think you’ll like the payoff of this gift-worthy jar from the beautiful Umami Girl blog.

Who’s Making Dinner Tonight? – How About We

  • Eight couples reveal how they eat, who does the shopping, what food they make on special occasions, and which partner ends up on clean-up duty. We know you’ve always wanted to peek into other people’s kitchens…

Healthful Burgers for Summer Grilling – Greatist

Dinner Conversation: Dating a Chef & Memorial Day BBQ Chips

Homemade Sweet Potato BBQ Chips from How Sweet It Is

Each week, we’ll round up posts, videos, and even playlists to entertain you while you cook, and provide conversation fodder for tonight’s Blue Apron dinner. Today we’re planning for this weekend’s grilling events and reading up on how to stay in shape all summer:

Dating a Pastry Chef – HowAboutWe

Eat Great and Lose Weight – Greatist

Must-Make Memorial Day Menu – Popsugar Food

What To Eat Beside Your Burger – Saveur

  • These BBQ sides might steal the day regardless of what’s going on the grill. We love the regionality of these all-American sides, from Southern hush puppies to Alaskan crab potato salad.

Homemade BBQ Sweet Potato Chips – How Sweet It Is
The best-ever chips might be the ones you make at home. Just in case you didn’t have your hands full with Memorial Day cooking prep (or…relaxation!) We’re especially enamoured of the homemade barbecue spice mixture.

Dinner Conversation: All the Sandwiches and How Great Packaging Makes Cooking Easy

Herb Chopping by Beauty and Some Beef

Each week, we’ll round up posts, videos, and even playlists to entertain you while you cook, and provide conversation fodder for tonight’s Blue Apron dinner. Today we’re planning for this weekend’s summery sandwiches and luxurious free time for getting busy in the kitchen:

An Herb-Chopping Trick – Beauty and Some Beef

Making Ground Beef Sexy Again – Huffington Post Taste

  • From burgers to meatballs, we tackle all the ways that ground beef, turkey, and chicken can help you make dinner in our weekly column for Huff Post. Don’t miss it!

Yearning for Simple Food – Poor Man’s Feast

All the sandwiches – Wikipedia

How Convenient Food Packaging Makes Eating Well Easy – Medium

  • How having food packaged in the right proportions makes eating well much easier. Moe Arora says he’s more likely to eat those carrots when he’s know exactly how and when they should appear in his dinner. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

The Elements of Arepas

When we created these arepas, the scent of browning, spicy chorizo was wafting through our kitchen. We had just invented a vegetarian version of the South American corn cakes – these Queso and Pepper Arepas with Kale Salad – and were hurrying to make sure that the meat eaters didn’t miss out on this specialty, which hails from Colombia and Venezuela. That’s where the chorizo came in.

Along with the spicy sausage, our test kitchen smelled of corn, crisping up in our pan, and loads of peppers–both poblanos and red bell peppers–softening. Our stomachs growled.

Marc Bittman described arepas in the New York Times as “corn-based English muffins.” Like English muffins, arepas are stuffed–make that overstuffed–with any filling you desire. Hence the cheese and peppers, then the chorizo.

Their affiliation with sandwiches is the end of that similarity, in our opinion. Arepas are made with a quick-cooking corn flour called masarepa, so they’re naturally gluten free. The masarepa absorbs added water and turns into a dough before your eyes. No need to add anything else but a pinch of salt before kneading it up.

Once formed into discs, arepas can be fried or baked. We pan-fry our version so the edges get slightly crispy, then finish them in the oven so the insides get completely cooked through before we slice them up and fill them with sausage. And peppers. And chimichurri.

But don’t let your imagination stop at chorizo. Arepa fillings can range from rustic to elevated. They can have one ingredeint like cheese, preferably melty, or a slew of complementary fixings, like ours. And arepas aren’t required to taste of South America. Ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly are perfectly suitable for the center of an arepa, especially to the American children of Colombians and Venezuelans.

You can see the full recipe for making Chorizo Arepas on the recipe card.

Dinner Conversation: Grandma’s Meals and Mom’s Day Brunch

Flowery Ice Cubes from A Cozy Kitchen

Each week, we’ll round up posts, videos, and even playlists to entertain you while you cook, and provide conversation fodder for tonight’s Blue Apron dinner. Today we’re planning for this weekend’s main event, Mother’s Day, a holiday best celebrated with comforting family food.

Grandma’s Best Food – Slate
This photographer’s travels took him to 58 countries, where he photographed the signature dishes of grandmas around the world, from Alaska to India and from moose steak to Chicken Vindaloo. And who taught mom to cook? Probably grandma!

Healthy Mother’s Day Brunching – Greatist
Greatist rounded up five extraordinarily delicious-looking brunch recipes, because not all holidays have to be built around gooey, cheesy, bacon-y celebration foods, and in fact we bet mom prefers Baked Blueberry French Toast to something more decadent.

Flowery Ice Cubes – A Cozy Kitchen
Make an extra-special drink for mom featuring gin, rhubarb syrup, and these creative, darling, fancy, mom-pleasing ice cubes, made from edible flowers.

Quick (but Gourmet) Weeknight Dinners – Daily Muse
We shared some of our favorite quick dinners with The Daily Muse’s readers, to be sure that all those busy professionals who don’t subscribe to Blue Apron (yet!) aren’t missing out on the fun.

Joan Nathan’s Cheese Blintzes – Food52
Cheese blintzes with berries are designed to be eaten on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, but  we think they’re perfectly designed to be mom pleasers, whether or not you bring them to mom in bed. Watch Joan get to work making the blintzes on a cooking video from Tablet:

Thai Chicken Burgers with Hoisin Mayo and Potato Wedges

For as long as we can remember, burgers for dinner meant ground beef, American cheese, ketchup, mustard, lettuce, and a grill. But these days we mix up our all-American sandwich with inspiration from across the globe.

In the case of this mouth-watering Chicken Burger, we start our renovation with the meat, using lighter ground chicken instead of the beef and move up through the flavorings – lemongrass! ginger! – finishing in the condiment department with hoisin-sriracha mayonnaise and sprigs of fresh cilantro.

Here’s how we do it. First, you take the lemon grass, an essential ingredient in Thai cooking. It’s sometimes a little bit hard to find at a regular supermarket, but you’ll probably recognize the scent as soon as you cut into it and are transported to a Bangkok market – or at least your local Thai restaurant.

Then peel off the tough outer part of the lemongrass as if it’s a scallion and dice the pliable inside core. Chop up the garlic and ginger too.

The potato wedges are going to be the side dish on this one. What would a burger be without fries? Those we didn’t mess with much, don’t worry.

They get a sprinkling of fresh thyme leaves, a glug of olive oil, and some salt and pepper before heading into a 500°F oven for 20 to 25 minutes, where they’ll cook and crisp up.Continue reading “Thai Chicken Burgers with Hoisin Mayo and Potato Wedges”

Dinner Conversation: The Derby and Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo DIY Decoration from You Are My Fave

Each week, we’ll round up posts, videos, and even playlists to entertain you while you cook, and provide conversation fodder for tonight’s Blue Apron dinner. Today we’re planning for this weekend’s events, The Kentucky Derby and Cinco de Mayo:

All the Mint Juleps – Huff Post Taste

  • The bourbon-based Mint Julep is the libation of choice at this weekend’s racing festivities in Kentucky and on the bar circuit everywhere. The basic version contains just booze, sugar, mint, and ice, and is served in a quintessential pewter cup. The Huff Post rounds up variations on this theme, perfect for toasting with on Derby Day.

Cilantro-Lime Quinoa – Two Peas & Their Pod

  • A Cinco de Mayo lunch or side that doesn’t contain your entire daily allotment of calories, this cinch of quinoa dish is a good addition to any Mexican spread or potluck, since it gives all eaters a little something healthy to nosh on.

How to Make Goat Cheese Guacamole – Weelicious

  • A guacamole variation that’ll inspire your Cinco de Mayo party guests to ask “what’s in this?” and then go in for another scoop. Only you will know the incredible answer: fresh goat cheese. Yum!

A Terrible Tortilla Joke – Adam Patch on Vimeo

Here’s How: Cook Your Grains Like Pasta

HERE’S HOW is a series where we share the best useful tips from our cooking adventures. We’ll answer questions before you have them and illuminate food mysteries with a blend of science and legend.

“Bring a big pot of water to boil.”

If you’ve ever cooked pasta, you know that phrase. A stockpot full of water set over high heat means dinnertime is approaching, and fast.

We love spaghetti, linguine, and egg noodles with great fervor, but we love variety too. Enter: grains, from freekah to millet, which find a frequent place in our dinners.

Yet even when we give pasta a break, we often like to use the “pasta method” to cook rice and other grains. Just as we’d throw our penne into boiling water, we add grains to the pot, then drain them in a fine mesh strainer after they’re cooked. There’s no need to measure the water when you do it this way, and you don’t have to monitor the pot so closely. In other words, it’s harder to mess up.

We love this method because it’s a more streamlined process, and in the case of the Quinoa with Baby Squashes, Basil, and French Feta Cheese, makes sure the quinoa holds its shape and texture better than when it slowly simmers, absorbs a pre-measured amount of water. In fact, the pasta method is how quinoa is cooked in its native Peru.

Here’s the rundown: boil several quarts of water in a pot with a lid, as if you were making pasta. Add a few pinches of salt and the grains you want to cook. Start checking the grains for doneness about 2 minutes before the package directions say they’ll be done; when grains are cooked to your liking, drain them in a metal mesh strainer. (Don’t use plastic or the hot water will melt it.)

Now you’re ready to eat or use them in your final dish.

Got questions about any of the techniques in our recipes? Leave a comment or shoot us a tweet and we’ll answer your question in an upcoming post.

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5 Mexican Standouts for Cinco De Mayo

Cinco de Mayo honors the triumph of the Mexican people of Puebla, a town just south of Mexico City, over the French army on May 5, 1862. Each year on the fifth of May – thus the holiday’s name – people of Mexican descent celebrate the day as a symbol of the country’s independence. They’re joined by any and all who love to toast the culture and cuisine of United States’ southern neighbor with tequila, tamales, and tacos like these inspired dishes from our archives. Mix up some margaritas and let’s go!

Chopped Mexican Salad with Chicken and Corn

Corn is ancient Mexican food – we’re talking cultivation going back 12,000 years – and crisp kernels lend their signature crunch to this tasty salad of greens studded with radishes, cubes of juicy chicken, and rich queso fresco. It’s a perfect Cinco de Mayo lunch or light dinner.

Pork Tamales with Smoked Chili Sauce and Mango

Corn husks stuffed with flavorful meat and hearty corn dough become small, yet hearty, packets of portable goodness known as tamales. Here, pork seasoned with poblanos and salty fresh cheese is the centerpoint for the tamales, which we then top with a piquant sauce rendered smoky by chipotles.

Chicken Mole Enchiladas

Mole is a deeply flavored condiment that reminds us how Mexican food is seriously regional, not only a matter of tacos and quesadillas. Each region’s mole features a different set of flavors, from chiles to pumpkin seeds. Perfect for Cinco de Mayo, the most popular version of mole hails from Puebla and features chocolate, cumin, and tomato paste.

Chicken Chilaquiles with Escarole Salad

A lighter, arguably more authentic version of nachos (not that we have anything against nachos!), chilaquiles are technically made from last night’s leftover tortillas, fried up and sauced with a spicy, salsa-like tomato mixture and shredded meat. Our chicken version uses fresh corn tortillas to liven up you this Mexican comfort food staple.

Tacos with Nopales

The young, edible pads of the prickly pear cactus grow in Mexico and throughout the southwestern United States. Sautéed with peppers and onions, they make a satisfying vegetarian filling for tacos made from warmed corn tortillas, and one that’s a little more unusual than chicken or steak.

Dinner Conversation: Ramp Pizza and an Ice Cream Sandwich Tip

gif from BuzzFeedFood

Each week, we’ll round up posts, videos, and even playlists to entertain you while you cook, and provide conversation fodder for tonight’s Blue Apron dinner. Here’s what we’re reading and watching today:

Ramp Pizza – SmittenKitchen

  • A recipe for a weekend baking project that starts with a trip to the market to buy ramps, one of spring’s most beloved vegetables (which subscribers will get to try next week). Deb makes homemade pizza dough, tops it with sauce, cheese, and these lovely wild leek.

Interview with David Rockwell – The New Potato

  • The New Potato’s interview of the master of restaurant design, David Rockwell, explores how the look of a restuarant can tell a story, why dining is like going to the theater, and what it was like to bring restaurant design principles to…an airport terminal.

Genius Ice Cream Sandwich Shortcut – BuzzFeedFood

  • How to make a perfect ice cream sandwich using nothing but a knife, two cookies, and a pint of ice cream. Seriously  this tip is going to make summer weekends about ten times better. Let us know if you try it!

Dinner Party Ice Breakers – TheKitchn

  • Ways to start conversations at cocktail and dinner parties without reverting to the essential, “So, what do you do?” Some of our favorite suggestions include: doing the Harlem Shake, asking what animal you’d most like to be, and inquiring whether your conversation partner is a native Pittsburgher.

6 Ways Dining at Restaurants Causes Overeating – Summer Tomato

  • A totally sensible list that details how going to a restaurant can derail your attempts to eat mindfully and well. We’d like to add a seventh point to the list: make dinner at home!