Plus 4-7 hours of cooking and cleaning. Suddenly you just spent an entire work day on dinner.

I'll throw in the excellent 5 ingredients 10 minutes http://5ingredients10minutes.com/ from Jules Clancy, most of the recipes can be found for free on her blog at thestonesoup.com 10 minutes required a bit of training, but it's almost always easily cheaper, faster and better than random food for order.

There's really no need to spend 4-7 hours a week prepping food if all you want is a decent and healthy dinner - though spending time preparing something fancy for friends and family is a rewarding activity in it's own right, but that's an entirely different matter.

You do that with blue apron as well....? I dunno, cooking is an inherently relaxing experience for me and many others. I don't think Blue Apron is a better solution if you're making the "counting hours" argument, as for much less money I could do marginally more work and spend marginally more time. That's a win in my opinion.

It's really not marginally more work. I think it'd take me at least three hours a week to plan out meals like Blue Apron does and acquire all the ingredients myself. That's a ~42% increase in time spent if you wager 7 hours normally spent on cooking and cleaning.

But I also just flat-out don't like going to the grocery store, mainly because the one near me is so busy. It's great if I go at 11PM on a weeknight, but I'm usually too sleepy to do that. It's complete chaos on a Saturday or Sunday (and go too late on a Sunday and the produce section will be emptied out too).

I haven't used Blue Apron, but they do all the prep, which is often the biggest time suck in cooking something complex. Anyhow, if you find that part relaxing, I think that just means you're not Blue Apron's target customer. That's fine, but insufficient for making claims about whether or not Blue Apron is a good solution in general.

I would recommend trying PeachDish. https://www.peachdish.com/ We are the best quality meal kit company. We were voted best quality by Forbes and the New York Observer. I would be honored to be upvoted by the HN community. Thank you. I started it in my garage 4 years ago- the first year I was not sure about the food, and then met my business partner judith, who used to be president of slow food in the south east, and her husband is an organic farmer.

Thank you,

Hadi Founder, PeachDish - also use coupon code HADI

I do go to the store (and the farmers market) and buy groceries, and cook, all the time. I've recently been curious about Blue Apron as a relatively low-effort way to expand what I cook and how I cook it.

My wife and I have been using Plated and HelloFresh for over a year now. While the services are not cheap, I have found that it's a much better and cheaper option over the course of a week. The food tastes better than the things I would attempt to cook, but more importantly, I end up saving money on meals because I don't end up wasting ingredients or throwing away leftovers.