Home Chef Dinner Subscription Box Review & $30 Coupon – January 2016

Home Chef is a dinner 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 to other weekly meal delivery services  like Hello Fresh and Plated but like all of them, has its own unique features and perspectives. (We don’t typically review Blue Apron – in the past we’ve found it extremely fussy, with small portion sizes).

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 the other ones, offering 10 selections available for 2, 4, or 6 people, a breakfast choice, a smoothie choice, and a fruit basket selection. Currently this is the least expensive and has the most choice out of any similar major subscriptions, so we had to give it a try.

Your weekly parcel contains your recipe cards and all the ingredients for your meals. Everything arrived bundled inside insulated packaging with big ice packs to keep it cold.

The meat is placed in the bottom of box and packed with several ice packs.

We were really impressed with the recipe choices — there are tons of 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 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.  We like this way of stating the fridge stability of the ingredients (instead of simply telling us to eat the fish first), as it allows us to plan our order of meals however we want, while still optimizing freshness.

The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures and boldfacing of ingredients.  The instructions were clear and complete, and I found them to be very thorough.  There was an inventory of ingredients provided, a listing of tools and items you provide (mainly S+P and oil), and the recipes had great hints littered throughout (like allowing the fries to cool for several minutes so they separate from the pan without losing their crust).  The only minor annoyance is the adherence to 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, but for novices we recommend following the directions exactly so you don’t get flustered or lose your place.

A plastic three-ring binder is included in your first box, so you can keep all your favorite recipes to make on your own later.  This is really useful for this kit — I am much more likely to replicate these recipes, because they use common ingredients.

Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag.

As we were coming back from vacation, we also ordered the fruit basket selection!

The fruit was very nice looking, and it was very flavorful and at a perfect stage of ripeness — ready to eat, but ok to hang out for the week without going to mush.  The fruit was blemish-free and really looked like it was selected for a fruit basket, not as an ingredient (“cooking” fruit is often the fruit “with a nice personality”).

New Year’s Eve Appetizers (Appetizers for 6-8) – Jalapeño Poppers with Bacon, Roasted Red Pepper, and Cream Cheese and Mini Pork Meatball Tacos. 50 minutes, intermediate, 310 cal. Whoops, they sent us shrimp instead of bacon – and credited our account for the meal, so we weren’t too broken up about it, although it could have been inconvenient for some. We picked up some sausage at the grocery store.

This large platter of food could certainly serve as appetizers for 6-8 people.  We at it as a meal for two — we were stuffed before we made it halfway through!  Pictured, along with the 12 half-jalapeno poppers, are 12 mini meatball tacos.  I was able to cut twenty wrappers out of the tortilla, and the meat and other fixings provided were enough to easily make twenty pieces, so we had eight tacos beyond those shown!  Even with the two distinct apps, the preparation was still relatively easy, the only time-consuming element being the precooking of bacon and meatballs.  

We were particularly fond of the jalapeno poppers.  They had great flavor, even with a simple filling.  We are definitely making these again.

Swiss-Smothered Chicken With Green Beans and Whipped Cauliflower. 45 minutes, intermediate, 620 cal.

The warm weather at the end of the year made for poor cauliflower harvests and correspondingly high prices, so we were delighted to see that a good portion of cauliflower still made it into our meal.  This dish had a very classic appeal was very elegant.  Given the name of the dish and the description, I thought I would be making a Swiss-style sauce white sauce — I was a little relieved to see that the chicken was to be covered with a slab of Swiss cheese instead.  This approach locked in the flavor and juices, and it was much simpler to prepare.  We loved all the elements of this dish — the veggies were perfect, and the cauliflower whip had just the right combo of creaminess and garlic kick.

Italian Sausage Farfalle With Mascarpone-Basil Parmesan Sauce. 40 mins, easy, 934 calories.

This dish had a wonderful, rustic feel to it, and the flavors and textures were superb.  Home Chef doesn’t provide quite the volume of herbs as the other meal boxes, but they are used to great effect.  Our household has a divided opinion on the deliciousness of mushrooms — I’ve found the Home Chef recipes to be really well constructed regarding inclusion of mushrooms — so far, every recipe with mushrooms in it has had them cooked in a separate step, making it easy to set them aside and add back in to selected servings only.

Home Chef is particularly known for its accessible ingredient choices, being a bit easier to prepare, and just being more liked by a wider range of palates.  We found this to be true and we also found that it was really delicious, and the amount of food in the box is really substantial. There’s still plenty of adventurous choices to be had with Home Chef too – the menu choices just aren’t quite as out there as Plated sometimes can be. We think the portions are larger with this box than other boxes, and the cost is a skosh lower too.

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.