Summary

I’ll cut to the chase. After struggling with the preparation of this dinner, and realizing that there were a lot of strange flavor combinations going on, I expected to hate this dish. Surprise! This meal, although it definitely can be classified as the strangest meal I’ve ever eaten, was really good!

So what led up to this tasty dish? Let’s start with the prep work. I worked hard on this dinner, and it wore me out. This didn’t go nearly as quickly as it should have gone. And since Blue Apron doesn’t put each meal’s ingredients in its own bag, there was no empty bag for me to put trash into. That frustrated me as I piled up the kale stems, orange peels, etc. on the counter.

• The sweet potatoes were difficult to slice into quarter inch slices. I need more muscles!
• The avocado wasn’t really ripe enough to mash with a fork, so I had to put more muscle into that as well.
• Then the instructions told me to chop garlic and use the back of my knife to smash into a paste. Someone must have really strong arms, but by the time I needed to make a garlic paste, there wasn’t really a working muscle left in my body, so the paste…well…it wasn’t a paste. Ok? Ok.

Panic Time
By the time I finished chopping, smashing, juicing, and slicing, a half hour had gone by and I’d gone nowhere near the main ingredient…the tilapia! The sweet potatoes were ready to be taken out of the oven, and I was starting to panic because I wasn’t ready to cook the fish yet.

At that point, the instructions were telling me to put things together that didn’t make any sense to me. That was when I started to think I would hate this dish.

You Want Me To Put What With What??!!
After all, who would eat a mixture of roasted sweet potatoes, kale marinated in a lime, orange juice, garlic, avocado sauce, topped with a smoky ancho chile pasted fish? It sounds and looks odd, honestly.

The End Result
But despite how tired I was at the end of the process, I don’t regret it. I ate every bite of this dinner, and wished for a little more. The sweetness of the soft roasted sweet potatoes combined with the tangy juicy marinated kale worked perfectly with the smoky tilapia, and the avocado slices gave it the perfect finishing touch. I still can’t believe all those things worked well together. It makes no sense to me. But it did. Go figure!

Bonus
Gail and I were just discussing the fact that we needed to eat more foods that were rich in potassium and magnesium, and I’d just made a list earlier today. As it turned out this meal included a pretty large portion of the list! Things in this meal that were on my list:

• Kale
• Avocado
• Sweet potato with skin on
• Oranges
• Tilapia

How awesome is that??

The prep work and time it took to make definitely brought the score down some, but the flavor and nutritional value was worth the effort. I was starting to doubt Blue Apron for a little while there, but they pulled it off in the end.