For years, we've been subscribing to the Blue Apron meal service. But ever since we moved to Colorado, we seem to have trouble getting our deliveries on time. The excuses vary from severe weather to COVID19 to a shortage of FedEx trucks. So I decided to check out Hello Fresh. The cost for both services is similar - about $84/week for four 2-person meals. The Hello Fresh meals seem to have more calories, but I think that's because the portion sizes are bigger. We rarely had leftovers with Blue Apron, but we've had leftovers quite often with Hello Fresh. There seems to be less prep involved with Hello Fresh - more items arrive pre-chopped. Hello Fresh puts the ingredients for each meal in big brown bags; Blue Apron puts the condiments in a plastic bag, but the veggies and meat are packed loose in the shipping box (I think that's why they advertise they have less packaging waste to recycle). One of the best things about Blue Apron is I can order seafood every week; seafood seems to cost more with Hello Fresh, though they do have meatless options for Fridays in Lent (like this mushroom ravioli). I may end up keeping both services and just alternating between them. It sure cuts down on grocery shopping.
This week's Ladies Out to Lunch group decided to go to The Perfect Landing restaurant at the Centennial Airport.
For some reason it's an extremely popular place especially at lunch. The food was OK, probably better than the food court at most larger airports, but the view was amazing. Centennial is a small public airport that mostly services private planes and helicopters. I had a little trouble concentrating on the conversation; the planes taking off and landing right outside the window was quite distracting.
One of the things I noticed about the people in Colorado (at least in my neighborhood) is that they all seem to have dietary restrictions. Some are gluten-free; some vegan; others can't have dairy. So I decided to see if gluten-free muffins really would be healthier. I bought some almond flour and Stevia sweetener. According to Google, you can use both of those as a one-to-one substitute for regular flour and sugar... WRONG! Thank goodness I cut the liquid before mixing the ingredients. The gluten-free muffins rose only about half as high as a white flour muffin would. And, it immediately fell apart when I took it out of the pan. I think the worst part though was the taste. You'd think something made entirely out of almonds would have a nutty flavor, but these muffins tended to taste like cardboard. Thanks goodness for the blueberries or they would have been totally unpalatable. After this little experiment, I called one of my teacher friends in St Louis and we made plans to meet up at McDonalds in the future. It's nice having friends with cast-iron stomachs like mine who have NO restrictions on eating.
My sister started a weekly blog post titled Sunday Showcase to track the progress on her new house. I thought about implementing something similar, but then I realized all the posts would be about Bruce working on house projects. This week he insulated the hot-water pipes in the basement. The new houses around here use plastic pipe, nicely color-coded in red and blue so you can tell the hot lines from the cold. The trouble is they ran them side-by-side, with the lines often touching as they pass through floor joists. When you add the distance the hot water has to travel across an unheated basement to get from the water heater at one end of the house to my bathroom at the other end, it makes the water coming out of the shower feel lukewarm. Hopefully all this new insulation helps. It certainly couldn't hurt, though the black insulation is not nearly as festive as the brightly colored pipes.
