Blue Apron Review: Bolognese With Bae

In the kitchen at my house, it's fair to say that I do most of the cooking. My hubby can make a mean meal, too, but since I enjoy cooking so much, it's a rare treat when he makes me dinner.

When we recently received our first ever Blue Apron box, I couldn't wait to cook my way through it! I was excited to try new recipes, dive into the interesting, new ingredients (things like pink lemons, fromage blanc and smoked dulse), and see how my food-tography would look when trying to match it to the Blue Apron standard. After completing the first of our three meals (you must try the catfish), I decided to ask my husband if he'd like to make the Spaghetti Bolognese later that week. To my delight, he agreed.

Usually, there aren't any recipes to follow when I'm throwing together a meal. I just kind of go with the flow, most days, or I work from memory to create favorites that I've already made dozens of times. So, when Spaghetti Saturday came around, I got to assist my sweetie whenever he needed a third (or fourth) hand. And, let me tell you, out of all of the things we unpacked from our Blue Apron box, I never considered that the chance to cook together would be one of them.

With the illustrated instructions, it was easy to stay on the same page and, for me, it was really fun to be the sous chef for a change. My hubby did an amazing job and produced a fantastic bolognese, but my favorite part of the meal was getting to work together as a team as I followed his lead in the kitchen. At the end, we both had something to be proud of.

Now, I'm not saying that a meal delivery service was entirely essential to our spending one night cooking a meal together, but it did give us the tools we needed to have a fun, stress-free experience. Do we need to wait for another box to try it again? Absolutely not. All we need are the proper ingredients and a recipe to follow.

I encourage other couples who may be reading this to try cooking a meal with your significant others. You can learn a lot about a person by working together with them to achieve a common goal, and the kitchen is a great place to observe a person's true colors. Are you communicating clearly or are you yelling at each other? Is your partner being patient with you and vice versa?

If you do opt to cook together by using a Blue Apron box, you can cut out a lot of the stress of measuring out ingredients and googling cooking instructions on the fly, but I think this experiment would work just as well, so long as you have a recipe. You could even take your list to the store and make a date out of shopping together before bringing everything back home to cook.

No matter how you choose to cook together, teamwork and communication are key. Good luck, and bon appétit!