We ordered up a big five-meal box of Home Chef this week, and it even includes breakfast!  Home Chef is a meal in a box subscription – every week choose from a variety of recipes and have all the ingredients and preparation instruction delivered to your door.  It’s similar in concept to other weekly meal delivery services, but it has its own unique features and perspectives.

When you sign up you fill out a mini profile of your family and tastes so Home Chef can automatically suggest a weekly menu for you, which you are welcome to change. The selections for this meal subscription are much larger than what is available for other meal kits.  While most meal kits focus on a handful of elegant dinner entrees and the occasional desert, with each designed for two people, Home Chef offers an incredible 10 selections available for 2, 4, or 6 people, a breakfast choice, a smoothie choice, and a fruit basket selection.  The plethora of great choices has us loving this subscription — currently this is the least expensive and has the most choice out of any similar major subscriptions (for 2 people).

Your weekly parcel contains your recipe cards and all the ingredients for your meals, bundled inside insulated packaging with big ice packs to keep it cold.  Home Chef has tended to require less of a contribution from your own larder than the other subscriptions — while every box has you provide a couple tablespoons of cooking oil and salt and pepper, Home Chef has gone out of its way to provide everything else you need.  They usually include liquid egg when needed (other boxes expect you to have an egg or two on hand), and they even sent a bottle of oil when we were shallow-frying our hushpuppies in a previous box.

The meat is placed in the bottom of box and packed with several ice packs.  Even when we neglect to unbox the package right away, the meat has remained very cold.

We have been impressed with the recipe choices — they have really tasty sounding recipes for offering so many options!  We also thought the meals were more accessible than the other meal kit subscription boxes, which tend to use lots of ancient grains, alternative greens, exotic spices, and likes to target the foodie crowd.  This subscription has plenty of flavor and variety, but it uses more familiar ingredients.The recipe cards that come with each box have all the info we like to see — prep time, difficulty, and allergen and nutrition info.  They also included a drink pairing suggestion (something other boxes have dabbled in but not stuck with), and a “best cooked by” time frame.

The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures and boldfacing of ingredients, and an inventory of everything provided.  The recipes had great hints littered throughout — either expanding your cooking vocabulary by explaining cooking terminology (often medieval French) in layman’s terms, or expounding on the benefits of specific techniques.  The only minor annoyance is the adherence to a standard prep order (i.e.:  preheat oven, chop veg, prep meat) — we switch the order a bit where it makes sense.  If you’re an experienced cook we do recommend cooking in the most efficient order (e.g. not pre-heated your oven thirty minutes prior to warming a few tortillas), but for novices we recommend following the directions exactly so you don’t get flustered or lose your place. The recipe cards have pre-punched holes so you can store them in a recipe binder.  This was a clever touch — we review a large volume of meal kit recipes (just guessing, but we have probably prepared more meal kits than anyone in the country who doesn’t work for a meal kit company, since we have reviewed multiple meal kits every week for the last few years), so we don’t save recipes by habit — but providing a folder got me to hang onto the recipe cards.

Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag.  We like to unpack a bit, separating the refrigeration-required and pantry-permissive items.   FYI, this box cost $99.50.

Brasserie-Style Sirloin Steak With Truffle Frites, Green Beans, and Herb Butter. 45 mins, intermediate, 860 cals.

We really enjoyed this dish.  The steak was simply prepared and the two pieces were nearly identical in size and thickness, so they were easy to cook evenly.  The green beans were great, and the very flavorful compound butter was not even necessary, because the main items were all so delicious to begin with.  The frites were simply the best — then truffle oil added a wonderful depth of flavor, and oiling the fries made them crisp up, even when  asked instead of fried.

Everyone loved them!

Breakfast: South of the Border Sausage and Egg Biscuits With Sweet Potato and Poblano Hash. 25 mins, easy, 868 cal.

This was a very decadent breakfast sandwich platter.  The amount of butter in the eggs alone made it an indulgence.  I loved the poblano and sweet potato combo, but the buttery eggs were a bit too rich for my tummy.  Otherwise, it was quite a treat.  The chili-spiced sausage reminded me a bit of a nice chorizo, but Brandy would’ve preferred a more traditional breakfast sausage seasoning.  Still, it was very filling and had something to satisfy pretty much any palate.

Chicken Pesto Skewers With Chicken Thighs, Kale-Mozzarella Salad, and Lemon-Champagne Vinaigrette. 35 mins, easy, 969 cal.

Skewers and Kabobs are always a little extra work, so this dish wasn’t quite as easy to throw together as the others.  Brushing the chicken with pesto instead of marinating was a great innovation that did save a lot of time while imparting as much flavor as a marinade would.  Roasted veggies are always good, and the big serving of fresh mozzarella paired with a champagne vinaigrette really pushed the dish over the top.  I love, love, love the use of baby kale as the green — it stood up superbly to the warm kabob, resisting wilting, yet it had a mild flavor and delicate texture that is much more pleasant for a salad that ordinary, rugged kale.

Parmesan-Crusted Chicken With Arugula and Balsamic Vinaigrette. 35 mins, easy, 591 calories.

We stretched this dish by using the delicious chicken as a protein for both adults and two kids (we usually get some leftovers if its just the adults splitting the dish).  The chicken was absolutely delicious, with a beautiful crust and perfect texture.  The greens had yellowed a bit, so our salad portion was reduced a little, but it was still plenty for us.

Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps With Water Chestnuts and Sesame Dipping Sauce. 30 mins, easy, 625 cals.

A pretty salty dish, this one needed no additional seasoning.  This was a very easy to construct version of one of our favorite dishes.   This was perhaps not the absolute best version, but it was, by far,  the easiest and quickest to prepare.

This batch of recipes was very hearty and rich — at least the selections we chose were.  Even the lighter kebabs were loaded with flavorful pesto — a nice set of meals for cool weather.   If you don’t mind dinner being a filling and slightly indulgent meal, then Home Chef has a lot to offer.

We have been extremely impressed with Home Chef, and it has been very popular with our readers, as well.  The recipes and ingredients have produced really nice meals every time we’ve tried it, and their are tons of options to choose each week.  We LOVE that we can pick a steak dinner every week, and that we don’t have to cut up one steak to get two portions (Plated is particularly obnoxious about this). And we actually like that Home Chef doesn’t shy away from offering calorie-laden meals – there are so many choices that you can choose not to order them, or choose to, as we do.

Visit Home Chef to subscribe or find out more! Get $30 of free food when you sign up – just use this link to get the deal.