Most of you have tried meal kit delivery services, at least once. I’ve tried them all maybe because I was doing research for this blog, yeah that’s right, or maybe I like the kit and its tiny little perfectly packaged and wasteful components more than the meals themselves or maybe I am just lazy. If you’re lazy, do not order a meal kit. Sure, they do the shopping for you, but is shopping the hardest part of cooking? With meal kits, the challenge is handling the pressure of making all the meals they force on you before the food goes bad. Hey, Blue Apron, sometimes plans change. Then, you have all of those half-prepared food components clogging your fridge, reminding you that you can’t even get the meal kit dinner on the table. Yet, they are adorable and it’s fun getting deliveries and it’s fun to part with $70. For the record, Chef’d is my favorite, but it’s pricey.

This little recipe comes from Blue Apron where they awake bland jicama with a dazzling flavor makeover.

I first had this luscious Mexican street food at a cool haunt frequented by my daughter and her college friends in Manhattan’s East Village. Mexican street corn – elotes – we’ve all have had, if not on the streets of Mexico, at most country fairs with its buttery cobs showered in grated cheese, dusted lightly with chili powder and lime spritzed. Esquites, I learned, is practically a cupped version of its cobbed brother and ideal for picnics or for using up leftover corn on the cob.

Kendall insisted we have esquites and housemade sangria, her favorites from this VW van food truck turned restaurant. Hmm, she wasn’t of drinking age, yet her scene was much more sophisticated than my college days of downing PBRs at a rundown pub with fly paper flooring. Certain, as most parents of college students, that given our kids’ meager budgets and our very excellent parenting skills, college consumption of alcohol was limited to a serving or two on occasion. What to do?

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Most grocers now devote an entire aisle to prepared pasta sauce. Jarred sauces are great in a pinch (this is my go-to), but there’s something fresh and special about a simple sauce you make at home. With a handful of ingredients, you can very easily pull together this vodka sauce in no time, yet the flavors will incredibly rich, as though you’ve cooked for hours.

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Because we all need some magic when energy is low and demands are high. Roast salmon with a simple, yet impressive honey-mustardy-thymey glaze, can whip together for a weeknight meal or for a special dinner party or even a weeknight meal that feels like a special dinner party.

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I struggle with breakfast proteins. We love eggs in our household, but after awhile the egg thing gets boring and a glass milk isn’t enough. Honestly, we’d eat bacon for every meal, but it’s harder and harder to get behind the processed meat category, despite manufacturers’ promises to eliminate nitrates and hormones. I came across a recipe in my new cooking handbook, The Food Lab, that was surprisingly easy on ingredients and turned out big, big flavor. I’ve modified the recipe to make it crunchtime easy and made it a bit lighter using chicken instead of pork+bacon. And so, today folks, you’re gonna learn how the sausage is made. And it’s not like this.

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