Mr. CE and I love to cook, and eat at home a few days a week. A couple months ago, a friend convinced me to try Blue Apron, and although Mr. CE was skeptical (we know how to cook and have no shortage of recipes), we gave it a try. We were happily surprised!

Both of us work from home, and while we'll plan out several days of recipes each weekend, Wednesday or Thursday often rolls around, it's 5 pm and we realize we have no plans for dinner and no energy to go to the grocery store, so we end up going out or ordering in, which gets costly. Repeat again on Thursday and Friday, and we've almost certainly spent anywhere between $200 and $500 for three meals for two people.

Anyway, as I was saying, we were skeptics, but got hooked. On Wednesday afternoons, the ingredients for three days worth of dinners arrive. No grocery trips needed. We got curious, so we started experimenting, and have since tried:

* Blue Apron
* Home Chef
* Sun Basket
* Green Chef
* Hello Fresh

After doing at least one week of each, we've settled on Blue Apron and Home Chef. The recipes are closest to what I'd call "restaurant quality" -- flavorful, interesting ingredients and things that we taste and immediately know we want to make again. The cost is about $10 per person per dish, so while we're paying a premium for the ingredients, we're saving money compared to what we'd pay to go out or order in. And often you're getting ingredients that, were you to purchase them in the smallest available size, would cost you far more than you're paying the meal delivery company. (For example, we had a dish this week which called for about a teaspoon of smoked dulse, which would have cost us about $15 if we'd bought a container of it (or, more likely, we would have skipped the recipe if we'd seen it in the New York Times or Serious Eats, which are two of our go-to recipe sites...now we'll buy it because we loved the dish).

Our MO is to look at both menus for the upcoming weeks, pick the service that look most appealing (you're choosing between six possible dishes with Blue Apron and 11 for Home Chef). Both services allow you to skip weeks entirely, which we're always doing with one or the other -- or both if we're traveling or neither menu sounds appealing.

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I'd love to hear if anyone thinks I'm missing a better service! Friends have told me about some that require less cooking and more assembling, which really doesn't appeal to us. (Sun Basket, for example, sent me an already chopped onion and a pre-mixed dressing. We both enjoy the process of cooking, so that was a turn off, as was the fact that the dishes just weren't that interesting. But I realize that some people would prefer to get pre-chopped veggies, etc. Different strokes for different folks!)

Some of our favorite Blue Apron recipes:
* Za'atar-Spiced Chicken with Pink Lemon Pan Sauce & Pearl Couscous with Brussels Sprouts and Almonds
* Seared catfish with glazed udon noodles
* Baked Ricotta Cannelloni with Romaine Salad & Meyer Lemon Dressing

We haven't gotten as many Home Chef meals (and it's possible that we may decide they're a bit too pedestrian for our tastes), but we really enjoyed:
* Korean Pork Medallions with Sriracha marinade and crunchy rice vinegar slaw
* Chicken Dijonnaise with zucchini and sun-dried tomato gratin