Blue Apron: Meal #1 (3-Chile Beef Chili)
3-Chile Beef Chili recipe.
As I posted about before, Blue Apron is a service that sends you everything you need to cook. Alas they don't send chopped garlic, instead sending you a head. Pain to do all the chopping yourself! Three meals a week, you get no choice in the meals.
Unfortunately this first week was a bad week for me meal-wise. I don't like spicy stuff, and all three had peppers in them. Also, they looked hard! But Blue Apron claims it takes 30 minutes to make, so we'll see.
The chili took me almost an hour to make, though 12 minutes of that was letting it simmer, which gave me a chance to clean the kitchen up.
Seeing how even Taco Bell's plastic cheese is too spicy for me (and anything else on their menu is spicy to the point where I can't eat it at all), I left out one of the three chiles (the one for "medium heat") and used only half of the other two. I used a very very small fraction of the spice blend. (If my recipe card had had a list of what was in those spices like the online version does, I might have used more.)
Turns out the flavor is actually quite nice. However, one reason I wanted to start with this one is that I've never had beans before (I know, I know) and I really wanted to try them. The texture is odd, but I could sort of handle that. The issue was the size/shape of them and how they could move around whole in my mouth. It was freaky and weird and I didn't like it at all. It doesn't for a moment help that I'm currently marathoning Hannibal and he eats the organs of people (and feeds them to others) and these look like little organs. Ugh!
I also tried avocado for the first time (horrible Californian that I am), I think I liked it? I didn't try it straight, just as part of the chili. There was very little I could use from the one they sent though (I think). I think it must be supposed to be green, but this one was mostly brown inside. I should have tried it straight, but I was having both beans and chili for the first time ever, and I couldn't bring myself to try another new thing.
If they send this again, I'll leave out the beans. The flavor is nice (I can't believe I'm saying that about something I made!), but I can't cope with the beans. :/ I think I might save some to try as lunch tomorrow, maybe sitting in the fridge overnight will change the texture. Or maybe mashing them up would work...
As I posted about before, Blue Apron is a service that sends you everything you need to cook. Alas they don't send chopped garlic, instead sending you a head. Pain to do all the chopping yourself! Three meals a week, you get no choice in the meals.
Unfortunately this first week was a bad week for me meal-wise. I don't like spicy stuff, and all three had peppers in them. Also, they looked hard! But Blue Apron claims it takes 30 minutes to make, so we'll see.
The chili took me almost an hour to make, though 12 minutes of that was letting it simmer, which gave me a chance to clean the kitchen up.
Seeing how even Taco Bell's plastic cheese is too spicy for me (and anything else on their menu is spicy to the point where I can't eat it at all), I left out one of the three chiles (the one for "medium heat") and used only half of the other two. I used a very very small fraction of the spice blend. (If my recipe card had had a list of what was in those spices like the online version does, I might have used more.)
Turns out the flavor is actually quite nice. However, one reason I wanted to start with this one is that I've never had beans before (I know, I know) and I really wanted to try them. The texture is odd, but I could sort of handle that. The issue was the size/shape of them and how they could move around whole in my mouth. It was freaky and weird and I didn't like it at all. It doesn't for a moment help that I'm currently marathoning Hannibal and he eats the organs of people (and feeds them to others) and these look like little organs. Ugh!
I also tried avocado for the first time (horrible Californian that I am), I think I liked it? I didn't try it straight, just as part of the chili. There was very little I could use from the one they sent though (I think). I think it must be supposed to be green, but this one was mostly brown inside. I should have tried it straight, but I was having both beans and chili for the first time ever, and I couldn't bring myself to try another new thing.
If they send this again, I'll leave out the beans. The flavor is nice (I can't believe I'm saying that about something I made!), but I can't cope with the beans. :/ I think I might save some to try as lunch tomorrow, maybe sitting in the fridge overnight will change the texture. Or maybe mashing them up would work...