In this recipe, they pickle shallots and use a little sugar with the pickling, to create a more "sweet" pickled shallot than a "sour" pickled shallot.
This is Standard Operating Procedure during pickling to make a sweet pickled product.
The downside to Blue Apron is you MAKE this stuff without understand why.
The upside is that you are exposed to things you wouldn't try.
For example, you should at least try pickling as described, but if it's not for you and you prefer a different flavor: that's a great lesson! And it makes you a better cook who now learned something about pickling, formed and opinion on pickling shallots and gained experience doing that. And that's kind of the power of Blue Apron for many of us.
Also for the record that quesadilla is 750 kcal per serving, even with the sweet pickled shallot.
And I mis-typed the quesadilla/shallot etc... I was thinking of the meal package as a whole. Adding that amount of sugar is not healthy anyway.
For a standard human near a 2000kcal/day diet, 500-500-1000, 400-1000-600, 1000-600-400, are all normal and healthy meal breakdowns depending on which meal of the day a person goes bigger on.
For someone who has a standard large lunch or large dinner, 750kcal is NO WHERE NEAR "a ton" but is rather an extremely healthy meal when we look at the breakdown of ingredients and their nutrients.
Of course, the only portion control that truly matters is PERSONAL. If 750kcal is too much for you personally, it's your own responsibility to eat half of that meal and save the other half for a future meal. There, it's only 375kcal and twice the servings!
"then I just go online and look around for some recipes and walk over to the store and grab something, or plan a day ahead and buy stuff for a couple of days ahead of time at 1/5th the cost and where I can better control for caloric intake."
That's what we all did before Blue Apron.
Then in 2 months of Blue Apron we'd tried dozens of new ingredients and cooking methods we'd never thought to try, that we'd never have picked off the internet, that our favorite food bloggers never wrote about, that our local grocery store never stocked.
I admit the cost is very large and not a long term solution, but as an educational tool I have not found anything which gets remotely close to Blue Apron.
And I love food bloggers, food Youtube, trendy cookbooks, and yet I still learn something new from every Blue Apron that I incorporate into my future diet plans.
Plus, it's convenient to get perfectly portioned amounts of rare and expensive ingredients. If you have to shell out $15 for $2 worth of an ingredient -- you're not going to make that meal ever. Plus, some of the ingredients they send me are not found at local grocery stores and require planning and tripping to massive farmers markets and buying in large bulk.
EDIT:
https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/usda_food_patt...
Men 20-30 should be around 2000-2600 kcal a day on average depending on activity, and women should be 1600-2000 depending on activity on average.
So perhaps women should consider eating only ~75% of a portion and giving their extra to a man, who could consider eating ~125% of a portion, to ensure that kcal goals for differing bodies are still met.
> For someone who has a standard large lunch or large dinner, 750kcal is NO WHERE NEAR "a ton" but is rather an extremely healthy meal when we look at the breakdown of ingredients and their nutrients.
No. Looking at the ingredients for many of these meals does not tell you much. Well, except in some cases where you are eating a pound of cheese over two meals. That should be telling you a lot.
>Then in 2 months of Blue Apron we'd tried dozens of new ingredients and cooking methods we'd never thought to try ... And I love food bloggers, food Youtube, trendy cookbooks
These are contradictory, or your sources here are the fault of your own poor research.
> If you have to shell out $15 for $2 worth of an ingredient...massive farmers markets and buying in large bulk
Why would you do any of that? Do you not have grocery stores? Even generic big box grocery stores carry everything that I've seen. And why would you go to a farmer's market? You don't actually think that the food you're getting from Blue Apron is like, fresh food from independent farmers do you?
If you don't need 750 calories, that's fine, just save a portion of the dish to eat later.
I've seen some comments about "well it's not much if you just spread out your calories by eating 750-250-1000" or whatever, but that's nonsense. You don't justify eating a large cheese pizza once/day because it's 2,000 calories and call yourself healthy. I mean, after all you did a 0-0-2000 split and hey that's under 2000!
This one here is 730 calories/serving: https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/spicy-korean-rice-cakes-wi...
This one is 800 and includes a half pound of cheese: https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/mozzarella-ricotta-calzone...
Here's another 750 calorie/serving item: https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/sweet-potato-quesadillas-w...
These are not healthy meals at that calorie count/serving. 750 calories should be right about half of the daily caloric intake for many people. And you're eating that all at dinner? Do you feel comfortable eating an entire box of mac'n cheese for dinner? Because that has less calories than do these meal options.
For a dinner, aiming for 750 calories per person doesn't seem crazy to me.
If you are very small you may need less than that. In that case, eat less.
If they were to ship out 400 calorie dinners, people would be very, very unsatisfied. If you're a small person, you probably don't experience this, but big people that are very active need to eat a lot. I know people that eat close to 4000 calories per day and could easily make room for more.
Personally, as someone on a weight loss journey (unapologetic euphemism for 'fatass'), I have paid very close attention to caloric intake. At my high, I would need about 2200 calories per day to lose weight at the supposed healthy rate of 2lbs per day. If I ate much less than that I wouldn't have energy and would be hungry constantly; this isn't healthy and one of the reasons starving oneself isn't a great weight loss strategy. Of course as I lost weight, my caloric needs changed - 20lbs down I started to need to eat closer to 2000 calories per day.
There are metabolism calculators online; in my case, I was surprised to see they accurately predicted how I would react to various levels of caloric intake.
I would recommend plugging in values you'd estimate for people you know and people you see on e.g. TV. You might be surprised at how different their experiences are in terms of what constitutes a healthy maintenance diet.