So if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I started using eMeals and Safeway Grocery Delivery sometime last year.  I’ve been pretty happy with it, for the most part.  Usually I pick out about 4 meals (out of the 7 recipes sent) each week and order the groceries for them.  I pay a bit for the groceries to be delivered, and I often end up with a lot of extra food.  Also, I’ve gotten kind of bored with the recipes from eMeals lately.  They’ve used some repeat things some weeks, like for example, the side for 3 meals one week was sweet potato tater tots.  Not that I don’t like sweet potato tots, but who wants the same thing 3 times in one week?  So I decided to look around and see what other options were out there.

Enter Blue Apron.  Blue Apron covers both the recipes and the grocery delivery all in one.  You sign up for their service, which is $59.94 each week and includes 3 meals, each including 2 servings.  That might sound expensive, but honestly after including the cost of eMeals for a year, plus the cost of grocery delivery, it’s really not that much more than I’ve been paying.  And $9.99 a meal is still quite a bit cheaper than eating out at most restaurants, especially those that would serve the kind of meals that Blue Apron provides.  Also the serving sizes for the Blue Apron meals are actually a bit bigger than what I was getting with the eMeals recipes.  One of the reasons we started with eMeals was to eat low-calorie meals at home, which means we chose the 500-calorie eMeals plan and all our recipes are just 500 calories or less per serving.  The Blue Apron servings seem pretty healthy too, but (probably because the serving sizes are a bit larger) they tend to be between 500-700 calories per serving so far.  The cool thing about this is that I’ve actually been able to get 3 servings out of each recipe and it’s about the same amount of food we were getting from each eMeals meal.  It also means we can get 8 or 9 meals out of the Blue Apron delivery each week instead of the 6 meals that it’s supposed to be. 

So far, I’m actually pretty impressed with Blue Apron.  Ricky’s comment about it was that the meals seemed like they were a bit of a higher quality.  The recipes certainly seem fancier to me, using some ingredients that you wouldn’t normally use when cooking at home too often, and some that I’ve never even heard of.  The Blue Apron meals also seem to have a lot of flavor so far, which is something that was sometimes lacking in some of the eMeals recipes.  Some of them just didn’t have much of a taste to them, really.  Ricky especially complained of this a lot.  He basically puts Sriracha on everything, and he did that with pretty much everything I made from eMeals.  With Blue Apron, I’ve at least gotten him to try a few bites of the meals before adding Sriracha, and he even seems pleased with the flavors.

I really love Blue Apron’s branding and the ease of use of their website and recipes.  The website looks very clean and is easy to navigate.  Signing up is an easy process, and once you do, you can easily find what your next meal delivery will be.  You get the option to select what kinds of meat you don’t want in your recipes (I opted to not get any with lamb) and then Blue Apron picks 3 recipes for you to get that week. Once the recipes show up on the website for a week, you can choose to pick from certain combinations of 6 different ones, so you do get some options each week.  You can also choose to skip weeks, which I did for next week, since I will be gone and I don’t see Ricky cooking the meals on his own.

Our Blue Apron Recipes for this week

You choose the day that you get your Blue Apron ingredients and recipes, and I chose Friday, because I work from home that day and it’s the day I was used to getting groceries delivered anyway.  Blue Apron also sends you everything in a cardboard box that’s packed really well with ice packs in a refrigeration pack, so even if you’re not home when the delivery is made, the food will stay good. The featured image on this post is all of the ingredients laid out for all 3 of our meals from Blue Apron for this week.

Tonight I made our third and final meal for this week from Blue Apron.  So far they have all turned out pretty well, honestly.  Despite Ricky complaining how there’s not enough food (because I split them into 3 servings instead of 2), it’s actually about the same amount we were each getting with a serving of an eMeals recipes.  (He always complained there wasn’t enough food with those too.)  Tonight we were both pretty hungry, so I actually just did 2 servings of tonight’s recipe, and it seemed like a lot to me.

Overall, if you want to cook healthy meals at home, and you are not big on all the time it takes to plan meals and shop for groceries, I’d definitely recommend checking out Blue Apron.  As an introvert (that lives with a very social extrovert!) who needs her free/down time pretty often, I’m always looking for ways to save time, and I know that can’t be fast food or eating out all the time.  Blue Apron seems like a good fit for us so far.  I look forward to seeing what’s on the menu next week!

Tonight’s Blue Apron meal: Roasted Japanese Sweet Potatoes with Miso-Dressed Spinach & Candied Cashews

Here it is, my last review for the Phoenix Film Festival. It was a fun ride, folks, as always. It’s always a blast to spend a few days basically watching really good films non-stop. I highly advocate everyone that likes movies at all to come out and join me next year. My friend Haley tagged along this year on Saturday and Sunday, and I think she had a really good time checking out the films with me.

Sleeping with Other People was the closing movie on Sunday night at the festival. There’s always a movie to close out the weekend, since that’s when the awards are given out and a lot of the filmmakers start heading back to their respective homes. While the festival technically goes on through Thursday, the rest of the week is basically a re-showing of the award winners and other good films from the weekend.

So, Sleeping with Other People. This movie stars some pretty big names like Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Natasha Lyonne, Amanda Peet, and Adam Scott. And first of all, I have to admit that I spent the better part of the movie building up a pretty big movie star crush on Jason Sudeikis. His character comes off as a pretty likable guy (even in a movie called Sleeping with Other People), and he plays him pretty darn well. Makes me wonder what the guy is like in real life… is he actually this cool for real?

Let’s talk about the plot. Sleeping with Other People is kind of a more modern retelling of When Harry Met Sally. A guy and a girl meet in college (admittedly under some somewhat strange circumstances), have sex – well, actually lose their virginity to each other, and then don’t see each other for years. When they run into each other on the street one day, they end up becoming best friends. And then trying to maintain that friendship.  You can kind of guess what happens from there.

Although you know how Sleeping with Other People will likely end, it’s still quite a fun ride. And pretty freaking hilarious along the way. I ended up reading some comments about the film on other review sites, and one word I kept seeing about it was “charm”. Yep, that’s a good thing to say about this movie. It definitely has its charm. Predictable, yes, but also just a cute, fun ride. It’s nothing too deep, and honestly When Harry Met Sally did do the “guys and girls can’t be friends” bit much better, but what other movie are you going to see where a guy shows a girl (using his finger and a jar, no nudity needed) how to pleasure herself, and actually has some good tips?

If you’re a fan of romantic comedies, Sleeping with Other People I’d recommend.  You won’t have to think too deep about relationships, but you will get quite a few laughs in.

So originally my plan for reviewing movies at the Phoenix Film Festival was going to be to pick my favorite each day and review that one.  Then Saturday happened, and while Listening was definitely my favorite film that day, I also really liked Seven Hours In Heaven as well.  So guess what that means?  Yep.  I’m reviewing both of them!

Seven Hours In Heaven reminded me of a couple of different films.  The first part of the plot is not that unusual, and has been done several times before.  A group of couples go on vacation together, or on some kind of retreat, and stuff happens.  Sound familiar?  If it does, it’s because that’s how Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married and Why Did I Get Married Too both start out.  It’s also not unlike how the comedy Grown Ups begins as well.  But where Seven Hours In Heaven differs and where it also takes its name from is where the originality shows up.  The group of eight people (four couples) ends up deciding to shake up the weekend a bit and get somewhat daring by splitting up for one night.  They draw names and go into separate bedrooms… with the couples mixed up and partners NOT in the same bedroom as the partner they came with, but someone else’s partner (of the opposite sex) instead.  A takeoff on the teenage game of “Seven Minutes in Heaven”, the plan is to spend the night with someone else, doors closed, no questions asked, no discussions about it later.  You can almost instantly see the drama this can (and of course, did) cause.

I loved this concept for Seven Hours In Heaven as soon as it was explained.  You could just see this going so many different ways.  Would they show any of the seven hours?  (They didn’t.)  Easy to guess that there would be some faithful and some unfaithful.  But who would it be?  And how would they find out?  Who would be the first to break down and talk about?  All stuff you knew would likely happen, but when or who it would be was the big question.  That’s what made this movie good to me and why I liked it almost from the beginning.  You knew some things would probably happen, but instead of feeling like it was predictable, it made you excited to see how it all played out.  At least that’s how I felt.

Films like Seven Hours In Heaven tend to be high up on my list, for the reason of how they delve into the human psyche.  One of my favorites from last year’s Phoenix Film Festival was The Trouble With The Truth, for the same reason.  I love the exploration of humans and relationships and how we all exist together and the mistakes we make.  People are fascinating, and there are some really good movies out there that dig deep into that and confront it head on.  Seven Hours In Heaven is one of those films.

The actors in Seven Hours In Heaven were every bit as good as the plot, and they worked well with it.  Colleen Hartnett, who wore quite a few different hats while making the film (including both co-producer and one of the lead actresses), was especially excellent as Lisa.  I don’t want to give away too much about her character.  You definitely just need to see it to see how great she is.

If you are into movies about humans and how we treat each other, and you get the chance to, definitely go see Seven Hours In Heaven.  This film takes a great concept and runs with it, giving you a chance to see how far some people are willing to go in their interactions with others.  Definitely one of my favorite films at the festival this year.