Blue Apron is Teaching Our Daughters to Cook

This was originally posted on The Chicago Moms
Blue Apron sponsors two of my favorite podcasts, so it was just a matter of time before I subscribed. Since one of our daughters became a vegetarian, I often struggle with meal ideas. One of Blue Apron’s appeals was that they found the recipes, sent the instructions and proportioned the ingredients. What I didn’t expect was how much our daughters would like cooking the meals. When the first box showed up, our daughters were excited. They choose the meals, so they knew what was in the package. They immediately decided that they were going to make dinner. I made them say it twice since they had never offered to make dinner before. They chose a 30 minute meal and started sorting ingredients. It took them about 30 minutes to get organized, which was probably not what Blue Apron had in mind when created the instructions. The girls worked together to wash, chop, saute, dice and bake our dinner. It was delicious. For years we have been teaching our girls to cook. I always said that one day they were going to have to know how to cook. They mastered a few things like baking muffins and cookies. They took random ingredients to create terrific smoothies. Until we subscribed to Blue Apron, we could not get them to make dinner. It might be the idea that they did not have to ask us for any help. Our girls are teenagers, so any time they asked for help, they treated it like a huge failing. It might be the idea that they have been talking more and more about going to college and living on their own. Maybe making Blue Apron meals in our kitchen made them feel like they were testing their independence. Whatever it was that drew them to Blue Apron meals, we’re happy about it. The last time we were in a grocery store, our daughters recognized some of the Blue Apron ingredients. They bragged to their friends about making a roasted fennel pasta. Even though we’ve served fennel before, I doubt they recognized it when they were chopping it. Now that they have used it in a meal, they talk about fennel like it was an old friend. We don’t have a weekly subscription because our lives are just too busy some weeks to even think about cooking dinner from scratch. Those are the weeks that we make a bunch of food Sunday afternoon and reheat all week. When we do have time to cook, we simply turn over the kitchen to our daughters. Watching them develop their culinary skills has been a wonderful bonus from our Blue Apron subscription.