Pan-seared Chicken Breasts with Purple Potato & Kale

April 29, 2016. My first meal from Blue Apron, one of those new food services that sends you a certain number of meals in a big box. They send you everything except salt, pepper and olive oil. I mean, they even sent me a tablespoon of butter! It's cute how everything comes in little packages.

I really like the lack of waste. I had kale in this but I didn't have to buy a huge bundle of it, just to have most of it rot in the fridge before I got around to eating it. I didn't have to buy a whole jar of Dijon mustard grain just to get two tablespoons for this recipe. It's hard cooking for one person, even with the occasional dinner guest.

This serving had about 700 calories. True, skin was on the chicken -- but my serving was kept to one chicken breast. And you only make enough for two meals at a time, so overeating would be limited if you actually had two people eating together. Me, I suppose I could have eaten both servings, but one made me really full.

One tablespoon of butter in whole thing, 4 teaspoons of olive oil. Everything was fresh, not frozen, not processed. And that's a huge difference for me, because I so often fall back on quick convenience foods.

The "intro special" for Blue Apron cost $30, for six individual meals. $5 a meal isn't bad at all, not when it's fresh and mostly healthy -- certainly healthier than I normally eat. The normal price is $50 for the package; that's a little over $8 a meal, which wouldn't be too bad if i could do it maybe once a month, instead of this every week deal.

While cooking, though, I had my doubts. How do you know when a purple potato is done, anyway? The veggie medley was certainly not a combination of things I'd ever tried: purple potatoes, onion, kale, one Granny Smith apple, almond slivers and Dijon mustard grain. It doesn't look good here, but it was surprisingly tasty. And it was an adventure, because I would never have come up with this on my own. (I could have done without the apple in it; for me, it was just one flavor too many.)
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I'm not sure how the leftovers will reheat, though. This was really yummy because of the crispy seared skin. I'm so proud it came out well because I have this slight, uh, phobia about cooking chicken. I'm always afraid it's not done, and I'm sure it's due to a past brush with death brought on by bad chicken salad. Which actually came from a respectable restaurant in town, not something I'd cooked. But still, you only have to spend 24 hours puking your guts out and praying for death to be marked for life.

I just don't know if I can afford to stay with the program. This is probably very cost effective for people who are used to cooking. But I'm not. I'm cheap and lazy when I shop for groceries, and I fall into that trap that so many of us po' folk do, which is choosing cheap but filling crap instead of healthy. It's expensive to eat fresh and healthy. Corporate American wants us fat, depressed and dying.

Sigh. I hate money. Probably because I don't have it, but it just gets in the way of doing what you'd really like.

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