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-Katie and Nick
Pretty good! I'm not sure I have much to say about this; it's rice, corn, black beans, and mango in a cardboard box you microwave and eat. Pretty hard to mess up, and it was not messed up. The spice did get to me a little bit, but the mango really seemed to help calm it down whenever I got a bite. Solid meal. I could take or leave the black beans.
Quick Bite from Katie: I thought my little bite was good. This is going on my maybe pile of things I'd order again once we have our preferences down. The only downside to Mosaic so far is that there is a limited number of dishes.
I quite liked this. I could have used more noodles but when can I not? The spice was just starting to really get to me when I finished. The tofu had really soaked up the sauce, which was good since as you may know, it doesn't have a good taste on its own. The carrots were a good accent to the spice. I could have definitely used more noodles though. I'm still a little hungry.
We're back, finally. We had some trouble with a food service that was rather unreliable so we didn't both reviewing any of the food. We're on a new meal service--Mosaic--which offers fresh vegetarian and vegan food you microwave. Let's dive into our first dishes!
Since the portions are individual, we may try both or only try one depending on previously established preferences (e.g. Nick hates pesto).
Hmmm. Well, the butternut is good, the pasta is good, the walnuts that were in here for some reason was fine, the sage... was not great. Once I stirred this together everything was coated in minced sage. It's hard to really enjoy pasta or butternut squash when all you can taste is thick sage coating. I don't think I would get this one again, or maybe perform an emergency sage-ectomy before mixing it all up. A more accurate title would be SAGE covering butternut squash and pasta.
Katie breaking in: I tried Nick's butternut dish. My first bite must not have had the sage overload on it because I thought it was good, reminiscent of Evol's Butternut Squash ravioli if you've had that. Unfortunately, my bites after Nick was done and it was all mixed were not as good. I found myself hunting for butternut squash pieces without green or cavatappi without green. With the green, it was just...yuck. If the dish had toned way down on the sage, it would have been quite good.
Off-topic but Panera used to have a butternut squash ravioli dish in the fall that I absolutely loved. They killed it though when they went on that "clean" food thing...kinda ruined the taste of most of their dishes, I think. I still like a couple things but it's not at all hard to decide what I want anymore.
The only thing I did not enjoy was this green stuff. I think it was the broccoli rabe because spinach is usually fine once it's been wilted down and cooked. It was all planty, not at all pleasant. However, the rest of the dish was great! The tomatoes were amazingly flavorful. I enjoyed spearing a cavatappi curl with a tomato piece that had the exact right amount of creamy pesto sauce drizzle on it. I would definitely, definitely eat this again.
Freshly provides a menu of relatively freshly prepared microwaveable dinners. We were very excited to try our first meal, picking the meal we thought we'd like the most to go first.
Post-meal thoughts:
Nick:
What the heck is this? This is not savory sweet. Why, I don't detect even a hint of teriyaki! I'm afraid Freshly stumbled right out of the gate; this just tasted like rice and chicken. There may have been a single atom of savory-sweet teriyaki somewhere in the universe of this dish, but it never came across my tongue. What a letdown. Katie asked if we like missed a sauce packet you were supposed to stir in or something, and that's a reasonable question, because this had absolutely zero taste. I hope we haven't made a terrible mistake.
Katie:
At first, I thought it was good. I must have gotten a few bites with the one splash of teriyaki either of our dishes got. There wasn't much flavor but I could taste something. But then. I ate more. And a little more. Suddenly, all I was tasting was rice with broccoli. The chicken, which I actually thought was quite tender and enjoyed for once, betrayed me with one of those gross pieces where something is popping and resisting in your mouth. What. The. Fuck. This is why I can't stand more than a few bites of meat before feeling like I want to barf. I know McDonald's gets a lot of shit for McNuggets and burgers but at least I can eat them without shit popping in my mouth.
I'm wondering if the pasta dishes I got for the rest of the week will be good. Perhaps it's just these chicken bowls that are going to be bad.
Katie:
I had to work late for a meeting so missed half the prep again. The prep I was there for was very easy as we skipped the mushrooms. We tried the prosciutto to see if we wanted it on our pasta. I've always liked it in small doses but the squishy texture was not right for the dish, at least for us.
Nick:
Easy - boil the pasta, make the sauce, combine and stir. The unusual step was frying panko breadcrumbs in butter, which I've never done before, and smelled absolutely delicious. Man, why aren't I frying more stuff in butter? You know, I wonder if I could make popcorn like that, melt the butter in a pan, pour on the kernels... nobody tell my doctor what I'm about to do.
Post-meal thoughts
Katie:
Nick:
Good! As Katie noted, we skipped the mushrooms and prosciutto, the mushrooms because ew, and the big P because of a texture concern; when I'm going to town on a nice bowl of pasta I don't necessarily want to get a mouthful of prosciutto. That's just weird. This resulted in the dish feeling like I didn't really get enough to eat, but what we did get was absolutely delicious. Per Katie, the sauce was a bit basic; what really elevated the dish was the breadcrumbs, which tasted amazing. It's like having the garlic bread right on the pasta! I don't know if I would specifically get this again, but I might just start butter frying panko breadcrumbs whenever it's pasta time from now on.
Katie:
I missed a good portion of the cooking due to work. I mainly just tested the farro to see if it was done and mixed things in at the end. Nick did a great job handling the bulk of the prep and cooking!
Nick:
Pretty easy; most of the cook time was waiting for the farro to cook and the chickpeas to roast in the oven. There was a step this time I've never done before where after the chickpeas got rinsed, they were put between two layers of paper towels, vigorously rubbed, and the chickpea, uh, outer skin layer had to be manually picked off. That was a little annoying. Otherwise, mostly reading Reddit while the chickpeas roast. None of them exploded this time at least!
Post-meal thoughts
Katie:
I thought this was pretty decent. The last time we had a Mediterranean dish, we weren't fans. I don't always like feta, I'd was skeptical of the roasted chickpeas too. The chickpeas turned out to be my favorite element in the dish. I enjoyed coming across some crunchy goodness between treasure hunts for a pepper slice or tomato half. The farro seems to be there mainly to fill out the dish rather than add any real flavoring. I'd select this again if it comes up in the meal rotation but I wouldn't go out of my way to order it in a restaurant.
Nick:
Not bad! I was a little disappointed that after carefully cooking and seasoning the farro, veggies, and chickpeas, the end taste of the product was the huge amount of tzatziki sauce we were directed to dump on the dish at the end. Just unloading two barrels of tzatziki all over the place. The best bite was when you got a squishy but flavorful half baby tomato, crunchy yellow pepper piece, nice and charred salty chickpea, and also there farro (as Katie pointed out, it mostly seems to be there to fill out the dish). Like Katie, I think I would probably make this again, but I didn't love it enough so that I wanted more when I was done. Perfectly acceptable. Also, we skipped the zucchini, because barf. To improve this dish, I would add another bell pepper (eating one in every bite, I still ran out before the end) and maybe roast the veggies a little bit; I think throwing them on the baking sheet for a few minutes with a little salt and olive oil on them would make them taste even better. Although then the peppers wouldn't be as crunchy. I have to end this review now, my cat woke up and wants me to pet him.
Nick:
Not too tough, but a bit unusual; we made the pasta in a pot, made the sauce in a sauce pan, then poured the cooked pasta into the sauce pan, cooked it a little more and spooned it into the bowls we were going to eat out of. Also, this is the first time I'm eating a caper. We left out the broccoli, because who puts frickin' broccoli in a pasta dish? Clearly wrong. Sick and wrong. Sick, sad and wrong.
Katie:
I don't mind broccoli in a stir fry or something savory but it's wrong in pasta. The tiny trees do not go well with pasta sauce at all. Anyway, prep. It was pretty straight forward. We have started tasting the optional spicy ingredients to see how spice we want our sauce (spoilers: not very spice).
Nick:
Very good! This is another dish that has you spice to taste, and with just a tiny bit of chili paste in it, this packed a bit of a kick (probably also because of all the garlic). However, the milk and butter kept it under control, and the milk, butter, garlic and roasted red pepper all worked great together. The only thing I didn't like was the capers, which tasted VERY strong; I ended up picking mine out after biting into one and getting a salt caper explosion in my mouth I did not enjoy. I'm not going to complain about not getting enough food since we deep-sixed the broccoli, so I'll just say I would happily have eaten twice as much as this. If every box meal turned out this well I'd be very pleased. Nice job, Blue Apron, you can continue existing.
Katie:
I had the ricotta mixture on mine since Nick wasn't a fan and that cut down on the spice for me. I thought this was great! I'd been looking forward to having this dish all week and was not disappointed. As Nick said, I could have happily eaten twice as much. The pasta choice was perfect, the shells held the more liquid than solid sauce instead and ensured each bite packed the red pepper flavor. I found myself eating as slow as I could to savor it and spend as much time enjoying it as I possibly could. I really hope this comes up in the rotation again.
I don't know how many of you are familiar with how these meal boxes work. The two we've tried work like this:
Nick:
This took almost an hour to cook, and there was a lot to do; the last time we had tofu we just drained it and cut it, but this time it had to be pressed under a heavy pot between two layers of paper towels for ten minutes. While that we as going on we had to cook the rice, prep the veggies, make the sauce, cook the tofu, put it in a bowl, cook the veggies, add the sauce, mix with the tofu in the bowl, plate the rice, plate the tofu and veggies, and add the garnish. Whew!! We skipped the peas, because they're nasty, and most of the hot sauce, because it was REAL hot and we're little babies.
Katie:
I was very proud of my skills in chopping the tofu into bite-sized cubes. I'm not sure why this took so long to cook, to be honest. It didn't feel like there were necessarily more steps than other dishes at all. We did take a break while we were pressing the tofu to play Pokémon Snap though. I got a great picture of Pichu!
Nick:
The sauce we made for this was absolutely delicious; as my dad would say, you could eat an old boot with enough of that sauce on it. The rice, carrots and stallions were delicious. The tofu was also there. Okay, I'm kidding; I'm not really a tofu fan, and the sauce made the tofu taste great, but I still wasn't in love with the texture. I think I would have liked this more if it was tofu-less; the sauce is the real star of the dish, and the sauce on, let's say, rice, carrots, scallions, water chestnuts and some red bell peppers would be delicious. The sauce saved it, but tolerating tofu is about as much as I can claim to like the stuff, and I don't know that I want any more dishes with it in there; unless the sauce is this good, and I would be shocked if that is possible, I just don't like it very much.
Katie:
I think this is one of the top 3 things we've gotten from the meal box delivery places so far! My only critique is that I would have liked more sauce. We cooked the tofu well enough so it was good and done, not squishy at all. Some of the carrots were that kind of blackened where it just makes it more sweet. Combine that with the sauce and it was perfection! I would absolutely get this again!
Katie:
I missed about half the prep this time as a work meeting went beyond my EOD. Nick heroically started cooking and prepping without me. He also bravely did all the meat-touching. Our first time cooking beef with both of us inquiring of the other "are we doing this right" every other minute. I'm going to let Nick go more in depth since he did much more of the lift today.
Nick:
Not too tough - season the beef, cook it in a pan, warm the pitas, make garlic labneh (put labneh in a bowl and add garlic), spread labneh on the pita, add beef, done. Just to look at the finished product, I was like, that is a lot of beef. I started getting worried - not as worried as last time after trying that nasty pesto shit they tried to poison us with - that this was going to be way too much beef. I have a bad feeling about this.
Post-meal thoughts
Too much beef. The pita is good, the garlic labneh is good, the seasoning on the beef is good, but even at half as much beef this would probably be too much beef. Just a ton of beef. This is like four or five burger's worth of beef in the pita. Maybe if it was like fried and crunchy. The taste was good, but the texture of all that beef... I guess we're not just big meat people. Another swing and a miss. You're on real thin ice now, Blue Apron! Don't mess these next two up!
Katie:
I wholeheartedly agree--too much beef but the pita, labneh, and zatar were all good. If there had been just a fraction of the beef in smaller chunks, maybe I would have actually finished it rather than took a few bites before making a face. To be fair, I can't even finish a whole burger most of the time as I'll get about halfway through being my meat meter is full and my sim makes a scronchy unhappy face in the status screen. What I'm saying is, I'm not the most unbiased source when it comes to meat, especially beef. Maybe I've even said this 7 times already and you're sick of hearing it! To fix this, I would have given us far less beef and made my mom come over to cook it for me.
Food Prep and Cooking
Nick:
This seemed simple enough; roast veggies, make couscous in a pot, make lemon labneh, combine. BTW, here's the super secret way to make lemon labneh:
1. Open labneh container.
2. Put labneh in a bowl.
3. Squirt lemon on top.
However, as we were wrapping up I started getting a really bad feeling. The third to last step was mixing salsa verde into the couscous, and I tried a little bit. I don't know what I thought salsa verde is, but this tasted 100% like pesto. Realizing I had just mixed what tasted like lawn waste into the couscous, I started getting a sinking feeling that this was gonna be real bad.
Katie:
I had never seen or heard of kohlrabi before. It looked like a squished green onion with tentacles coming out of it. The instructions said to peel it. I couldn't figure out how to do that so I just started cutting off big pieces of the outside with a knife. The inside looked like a melony potato.
I swear the last time I had salsa verde with something...it was just weird tasting green salsa. Not pesto liquid. Is there more than one??
Nick:
This was real bad. Actually, saying it was real bad seems like an understatement; I think this is the first thing we've made that was completely inedible. When you think of a shawarma-spiced vegetable & couscous bowl, what flavors do you think of? Shawarma? Maybe the nice earthy taste of roasted carrots and kohlrabi? The lemon mixed into the labneh and squired over the top of the finished dish? Well, none of these flavors are present; they have been obliterated by the nuclear explosion of pesto. This tastes like sitting down to eat a nice big bowl of bitter grass. Why is there pesto in this? What does pesto have to do with shawarma or roasted veggies or couscous? I took one bite, regretted the life decisions that had lead me to this point, and fed it right to the garbage disposal. You're on thin ice, Blue Apron. Absolutely disgusting. I wouldn't feed this to a pig I hated. Without any hyperbole, absolutely the most disgusting thing we've made with any of these meal services. Barf.
Katie:
Pesto is fine for pasta sometimes. I was not expecting pesto on my couscous. I think this would have been a hit if we'd just left the salsa verde off or had another sauce with this. We're going to have to be careful in our meal selection next time. Yuck for the pesto sauce. The roasted veggies and the labneh were really good though. It was just hard to taste them around the bad sauce.
