So I have a plan to start blogging on a more regular schedule.  I tried to do a poll on Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t allow for native polls anymore, and so only one person actually voted on it.  Oh well.  I think I am going to try to blog on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so hopefully this will help you know when to look for posts.  Although, according to someone else on Facebook, no one even reads my blog, in which case I’m just talking to the void.

Another regular feature I plan on starting is “Movie Mondays”, since I do watch a lot of movies and especially around Phoenix Film Festival time, I review a lot of movies as well.  If you aren’t interested in movie reviews, don’t worry, there will be plenty of other stuff happening around here also.  But make sure to let me know what you do want to see!

So that brings me to today’s post.  Over the next few days, prepare yourselves.  If you don’t like Star Wars, you might want to stay away for a few days.  I am a huge Star Wars fan, and this year I got the opportunity to attend the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, CA as a member of the press.  I am SO excited!  Starting tomorrow through Sunday, I will be blogging, tweeting, posting, and hopefully even some live streaming from the convention.  It should be a blast, and I hope you’ll follow along.

Now what exactly is Star Wars Celebration, you might ask?  Well, in short, it’s a Star Wars convention.  But a lot of stuff happens there.  This is actually the tenth Star Wars Celebration that has happened.  And it is an exciting one, because something big is happening this year… Episode VII!  One of the things that a lot of people are looking forward to at this particular Star Wars Celebration is a new trailer for Episode VII, which is expected to be shown in the opening panel with J. J. Abrams, the director.  One cool thing that Star Wars Celebration is doing this year is live streaming parts of the convention online, so even if you can’t be there you have an opportunity to see some of the cool stuff that happens.

There are a LOT of future and past Star Wars actors showing up at Star Wars Celebration, including almost all of the main actors in the original trilogy (except for Harrison Ford… Boo!).  They will be signing autographs, participating in photo opportunities, and speaking at panels.  I’m really looking forward to this.  It will be very exciting to see the stars of the movies that I’ve seen over and over again for years.

I’ve got some really cool things planned for these next few days, and I can’t wait to share them with you.  I don’t want to spoil all of the surprises though, so you’ll just have to follow along to see what I’m up to.  May the force be with you!

So I’ve noticed something lately.  Actually, it’s something I’ve been aware of for a while, but I guess I’ve just never really thought about it before.  It’s become pretty normal, or more likely, been normal for quite a while, to dislike yourself.  I mean, I’m not saying that most people hate themselves (hopefully most don’t), but it’s normal to always have something you want to change about yourself or something you don’t like.  I mean, if you really think about it, doesn’t this strike you as kind of weird?  I mean, so we are all born into this world, a world filled with people of all sizes, shapes, skin colors, hair colors, eye colors, genders, sexual orientations, heights, weights, likes, dislikes, food preferences, and plenty of other differences.  The world is a VERY diverse place.  Which to me, is pretty awesome.  It makes it a very colorful and fascinating place to live.  But yet, we spend so much of our time wanting to be different than we are.  Wanting to be more like someone else is.  I’d dare to say that all of us have something we’d like to change about ourselves.  We want to be skinnier, “better” looking (based on whose definition of “better”?), stronger, smarter, or different in some tangible way.  Why is that?  In a world that could not be more diverse, why do we want to be anything other than what we are?  Why do we want to be like someone else?  If you look at it from an outsider’s perspective, doesn’t that seem kind of strange?

We’re all so unique.  I mean, it’s evident in what we do, what we wear, what we like, what we read, what we listen to, who we spend time with, what our jobs are, or in any other aspect of our lives.  But yet, still, we want to change ourselves.  More than that, most of us dislike ourselves.  Why?  Why do we feel the need to be something else?  In a world that obviously accepts diversity (in general… I get that not everywhere or everyone accepts it completely) or at the very least, allows its existence, why do we not celebrate our own uniqueness?

I’m guilty of it too.  My biggest dislike about myself is my weight.  I wish I was skinnier.  I wish I had a different body, one that was more “normal size”.  The truth is, there are people both fatter and skinnier than me.  Don’t get me wrong, part of it is that I wish I was healthier, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.  We should all want to be healthy and live long lives.  But in all honesty, even being healthy is kind of misleading.  Sure, you can make sure your body is healthy.  But can you protect it from all the things out there that could harm it?  Not really.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t want to be healthy, but don’t let being healthy deceive you… just living in this world causes all kinds of risks that your health cannot prevent.

But even healthy people don’t like themselves.  They wish they were better looking, smarter, or better at something.  It’s never ending.  Why can’t we just decide that we are awesome, no matter how or what we are?  Each of us is a unique person in a world full of unique people.  Makes it sound not so great, doesn’t it?  But I think it’s awesome… because it gives us permission to be different, and yet to celebrate what we do have in common… that we are all different.

There are so many things out there that make our differences a negative thing.  Fat people are looked down upon.  Racism is still an issue.  We make fun of people who do things differently than us.  Why can’t we just decide that it’s all okay?  We’re unique, we’re different, we’re a wide variety.  And that’s a good thing.  We don’t need to change.  There’s nothing wrong with improvement, but that doesn’t mean we can’t like ourselves exactly as we are… even celebrate how awesome we are, right now, before any improvements.  It goes against the grain, but I think if we choose to like ourselves exactly as we are, it is the first step in also accepting and even celebrating everyone else’s uniqueness as well.  I mean, think about it – everyone liking and accepting themselves and each other?  World peace?  What a concept, huh?

I’ll leave you with a video that I think expresses the idea I’ve got here a little bit, if not a lot.  SO many women chose average in this video… why is so hard for all of us (men AND women) to see ourselves as beautiful (and awesome just as we are)?

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