Blue Apron: The $20 mashed potatoes

Swedish Meatballs & Braised Kale
with Lingonberry Jam & Creamy Mashed Potatoes

Recipe here.
Time: 20-25 minutes (I left the kitchen for a few minutes in the middle of things)

Almost as if Blue Apron could go back in time and react to me canceling their service, this meal was a disaster.

1) The flour was missing.
2) The container of lingonberry jam came open in the bag and made a mess.
3) The pork had gone bad.

I had been looking forward to this meal for a while. I wanted to try making meatballs, I like Swedish Meatballs, and this looked like one of the simpler things to make -- only three things to chop up!

I got the potatoes going, no problem. Then I opened the pork. It smelled off. At first I didn't trust my nose, so I continued on with the recipe. But the longer I smelled it, the more sure I was that something was wrong with it. I wish I had trusted myself off the bat, since then I could have saved the spices and breadcrumbs and tried again some other time with my own meat.

I didn't bother trying to make the kale, becasue without the meatballs there was no meal, and kale isn't a new food for me to try.

$60 for three meals = $20 per meal = I paid $20 for two small potatoes, a pat of butter, and a splash of milk. Go team me. The mashed potatoes were good, but not $20 good, plus that's a lot of potato for one person.

I don't want to tell them about it and try to get my money back, since they'd likely think I was doing it just because I canceled and was trying to get more out of them. My time with them is done, I don't want to continue to deal with them.

Book #15: Pictures of You

Pictures of You by TJ Alexian/tedwords.
(Book received free for review from the author.)
Rating: 4/liked (1-5/hated-loved)

There were a number of elements in Pictures of You shouldn't have worked for me, but they did and I ended up really enjoying the book.

It's told in first person: With rare exception, that never works for me.
The POV is a teenage girl: That alone would have sent me running in the other direction; lately I've read so many painfully bad books with a teenage girl POV.
It has a paranormal element (except not really), and usually that would make me uninterested in a book that is otherwise set in the normal world.
Also, while reading the book, I realized it was something I never read: A book set in the modern, normal world. I can't recall ever reading a fiction book set in our world with just normal, average people in it. I suppose I probably did as a teen or kid, but as an adult? I can't think of one.

So, that's a long list of things that I wouldn't usually like, but TJ Alexian made it work. All the characters, from the POV girl to the more minor ones, were believable as real people, and I was interested in knowing more about them.

The story was a mystery (with lots of other elements as well), and while I don't usually read those, I enjoyed it here. At one point I was sure I knew the ending and I didn't like it, but it turns out I was wrong. For a while I thought it was in fact a ghost responsible, and I didn't like that. I don't believe in ghosts (or anything there's not proof of), so to have it come up in what was otherwise our world annoyed me. I'm happy I was wrong! Not only am I happy to have been wrong, I enjoyed that I was fooled!

Ashley (the main character) and her family were trying to cope with the loss of Daniel, Ashley's brother. On top of that, videos of Daniel were getting posted to Youtube and emailed to her directly. Who would have such videos? Why would they send them to her anonymously? And leave cryptic little messages from "Daniel"?

I hadn't expected the ending at all, but looking back on it once I was finished, it fit.

Recommended!