So on trying my second meal from Blue Apron I realized that some of my criticism of the first meal was unfair.

Can you spot what’s wrong with this picture?

If you look closely in the picture above you’ll see that for today’s meal Spiced Pork Chops & Mashed Potatoes there are sugar snap peas laid out with the other ingredients. It seems two meals this week involved two different types of peas, and I grabbed the wrong ones. The peas that went into the Gemelli were English peas the larger rougher cousin to the sweet sugar snap.

With the mistake already made I had no choice but to compound it and make the pork chop recipe with the sugar snaps. Luckily sugar snaps make a decent substitution for English peas.

I would have preferred to sous-vide, but that’s not in the recipe

The recipe was otherwise very straight forward, though I don’t like how often they include “salt and pepper to taste” and other vagueness around how much salt to add. Salt, pepper and olive oil are the only ingredients that Blue Apron cooks are expected to have already, buts its always very exact about how much olive oil to use.

The recipes are designed to be simple to follow and not designed to be exact and idiot proof. I really would prefer if this was a scientific paper and these were the instructions to replicate the experiment’s results by peer revue. Instead of ‘heat oil in a pan until hot‘, tell me exactly what temperature the pan should be. Hot has a different definition between chefs and it seems in Blue Aprons interest to give detailed instructions so that everyone who uses their ingredients and recipe will get very consistent results.

The finished dish

The dish was very good. The peas cooked with shallot made a good topping and mashed potatoes are always a good pick. I feel like the kale was added just for color, as it didn’t add any flavor to the dish and had most of its texture cooked out of it. But as someone who doesn’t really like green and leafy it worked for me.

Lunch