Home cooking, you can’t beat it. Better than the vagaries of sitting down in a restaurant only to find your favourite dish has been shuffled off the menu. Better than takeaway with its seemingly inevitable wait for tepid food.

Even the process of cooking is part of the family experience, building anticipation and appetite.

But…

Just what did you do with the recipe? How many ounces of chicken was it? Can you bluff your way – and will it be edible?

Or how about that other scenario – the recipe is there and easy to follow. But you don’t have quite the right ingredients, not exactly. Or maybe you do, but as you look at the stuff you bought in the supermarket, something tells you the quality of the produce isn’t quite what you want it to be.

That’s where Blue Apron comes in.

Blue Apron delivers the ingredients for dinner – all you need for either two or four meals – so you can rustle them up into the perfect meal for you, your partner and your family.

Suddenly, thanks to the precise recipes and exact measurements of every ingredient you’re supplied with, you can feel confident you have just what you need. No more pesky missing bits, however minor, everything in just the right amounts, carefully and freshly prepared.

If you've ever thrown food away - and who hasn’t, it’s thought around half of the food in America goes to waste – the advantage of carefully measured ingredients is obvious. And because Blue Apron works on a subscription model, it’s able to predict the food it orders, allowing it to work with farmers to plan the crops, so they grow only what’s needed with nothing wasted at the end.

Blue Apron has partnered with more than 150 farms so that quality is kept relentlessly high. The supply chain is circumvented so that the ingredients go direct from the farmer via Blue Apron to you – there are no wholesalers, grocery warehouses and grocery stores to slow things down or mean the fruit and vegetables arrive a few days old. The Blue Apron way, everything’s super-fresh.

More than that, Blue Apron ensures that its meat and fish is high quality – the meat has no added hormones and no sub-therapeutic antibiotics. The fish and seafood are sustainable, as recommended by Seafood Watch.

It also means that even if some of the ingredients are hard to come across, you don’t have to worry, that’s Blue Apron’s problem.

As well as the ingredients being fresh and carefully selected, the recipes are designed to be straightforward but also to stretch you, helping you learn inventive new dishes made with seasonal ingredients.

There are plenty of culinary tips and tricks to learn from the blueapron.com website, too, from how to peel garlic to how to blanch vegetables.

The meals on offer are pretty tempting. One day you’ll be tucking in to roasted beef and farro salad, with sweet peppers, summer squash and olives. The next there’s tomato-saffron risotto with sautéed summer squash and baby greens salad. Licking your lips yet?

There are two-person plans with three recipes a week, and family (four-person) plans with either two or four recipes a week, delivered to your door once a week. But you can skip a week at any time and stop the subscription whenever you like – so what have you got to lose?

Each serving costs from $8.74 to $9.99 and delivery is free, and what's more, Blue Apron are offering $30 off on your first order.