What is Blue Apron? Located in New York, they are a weekly subscription service that delivers fresh, portioned out ingredients to your door with colored recipe cards with photos. You can choose vegetarian or meat and fish options. A subscription plan may sound scary, but there is no commitment to it meaning you can skip any week. I think for $9.99 a meal is a great price because you receive fresh produce, protein from places that practice sustainability, and speciality ingredients you may not have worked with before so it allows you to try new things! Besides the great food, Blue Apron offers FREE shipping, which can cost A LOT. My box was 19lbs!! I love free shipping.
My box! Blue Apron shipped it out on Monday and it arrived Wednesday still ice cold!
Now onto the food! For this post, I made their pork larb with coconut rice. Larb is a dish normally seen in Thai restaurants, but it's the national dish of Laos. Larb may sound peculiar, but it's really a salad of minced meat with fresh vegetables, that's it. I commend Blue Apron for recreating a Southeast Asian dish because Southeast Asian cuisine is hard to mimic correctly. There are a ton of different spices used, layers of flavor like sweet, salty, tangy, umami - something very hard to get. I must say, I was quite impressed with their simplified version of the dish but it still packed a lot of flavor, however, I would've liked more heat and an amplified level of sourness (Not their fault though, I'm Malaysian Chinese, so I can handle more heat and sourness than most). The coconut rice accompanied the larb well and it was easy to make!
Ingredients for the larb!
Ingredient list so you know what to pick out from the box! I love how everything is individually packaged and labeled.
Recipe card! It's in COLOR and there's PICTURES. What's not to love?!
I forgot to take a photo of the rice, but all I did was put 3/4 cup of jasmine rice, 1 cup of water, 5.5ounce of coconut milk, some salt in a pot, heated it up, placed the cover on, reduced the heat and let the rice cook for 20minutes (rice and coconut milk provided by BA).
Then I started mincing the garlic, ginger, lemongrass, slicing the red onion, plucked mint leaves off its stems, chopped cilantro, cut the birdseye chili, and slice the cucumber. Included was a carrot, but I'm allergic so I omitted that. I also kept the fibrous layers of the lemongrass for my own for soups! I never worked with lemongrass before, but it wasn't scary! I always thought you pound the stem and stick it in stocks, but there's a pliable core!
Garlic, Ginger, Lemongrass, Red Onion, Cilantro, Mint, Birdseye Chili, Cucumber (full portions not shown for the cucumber and red onion) It smelled SO good.
After I prepped everything, I heated up the pan with some olive oil and added the ground pork. When the pork started to brown, I added the garlic, ginger, lemongrass, chili, and kaffir lime leaf and stirred it around until the ginger and garlic became fragrant.
There was a lot of steam and I couldn't get a photo without steam!. Pork, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, chili, and kaffir lime mix
I stirred in the cucumber and red onion to the mix and let the other ingredients flavor them for a few minutes. Then I added the palm sugar and ponzu sauce and let everything simmer together.
I was blowing the steam away when taking this picture! Added red onion, cucumber, and ponzu and now letting everything blend together. YUM!!
The last step was to add the mint leaves, cilantro, and lime juice and stir. I checked on the rice and it turned out very well! It was light, fluffy, and had a great coconut aroma.
The final product! Pork larb with coconut rice with black sesame seeds on top! Can you spot the lettuce heART?
In all, it was a great meal! The larb had developed flavors I was not expecting in the short time it took to cook. It was sweet, salty, tangy and went well with the freshness of the bib lettuce and the coconut rice. I could've eaten the rice with excess juice poured on top and that would've been great! I added sambal, a chili paste with seeds to mine because the heat wasn't there for me, but other than that, it was a homerun!
Larb is typically eaten with sticky rice, but this coconut rice is a great sub! And if you add sugar, you can turn it into a sweet coconut rice and eat it with mangoes!
I would never attempt to create a Southeast Asian dish at home because there are just so many different ingredients that isn't available where I live, so I'm glad Blue Apron simplified, yet still kept the traditional flavors of larb alive with this meal.
In all, I'm a HUGE fan of Blue Apron! They let me try different ingredients and cuisines I normally may not cook at home. Perhaps next time I may "follow" their recipe while also adding my own spin to the dishes! ;)
If you want more information about Blue Apron, you can visit their website by clicking here. *I have no affiliation with Blue Apron, but I'd love too! =)* I'm just here spreading the love!
I know this post has been long, but I have a favor for the readers! If you haven't done so, please vote for my photo for the Santa Barbara News Press Food Photo Contest! It would mean a lot! Voting ends tomorrow 9/20! Please click HERE to vote!!
In case you missed the link above, click HERE to vote!! I appreciate it! Thank you!
Until Next Time!
CheFelicia
