Home Chef April 2016 Review & Coupon

Home Chef had some intensely satisfying dishes this week!  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.

Meal selections are suggested automatically according to a profile you fill out noting your family’s preferences, but you can change your selections any time. 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 portions are huge, and this is currently the least expensive and has the most choice out of any similar major subscriptions (for 2 people) – $9.95 per person per selection (they typically have one meal a week that’s a premium meal).

Everything arrived within well-insulated (water-dissolvable) cooler padding, atop ice packs.

Each bag has nearly everything needed to make a complete meal.  You have to have a basic kitchen setup (stove/oven, cookware, etc), but a couple tablespoons of cooking oil and salt and pepper are usually the only ingredients you have to have at home. Unlike other boxes, Home Chef includes liquid egg when needed — once they even included a bottle of oil for shallow-frying.

The meat is placed in the bottom of box and packed with several ice packs.  I suspect there are enough to keep it cold for a long time, even when summer arrives.

The recipe cards have just been reformatted — they still have prep time, difficulty,  a “best cooked by” time frame, and even a spice level, but they’ve dropped the drink pairing and just show calories instead of full nutrition info.  The picture is much bigger, and they’ve combined the lists of your pantry and kitchen equipment needs into one.  The cards look a bit like the Plated cards now.

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 usually have a pro-tip or explain some cooking terminology.  The reformat has streamlined recipes by pulling the tips out of the actual recipe and putting them in a sidebar.

The order of preparation has been streamlined, too — instead of chopping everything first, you are instructed to start the long lead time items first.  Although this makes the chopping slightly less efficient than doing it all at once, it gets your meal to the table faster, and with everything finishing cooking closer to the same time.  I like it for these reasons, and because it saves me from having a completely overflowing cutting board when I start cooking.  The recipe cards have pre-punched holes so you can store them in a recipe binder.

Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag.  Unless otherwise noted, each of the pictures of prepared food below show one of two servings made by each recipe. This box was $99.60 (2 meals, a premium meal, and a breakfast).

Tiki French Toast With Caramelized Pineapple with Hawaiian Bread and Bacon. 25-35 mins, easy, 1058 cal per serving.

This was easy and delicious — and it made a HUGE plate of French toasts (both portions are shown).  It’s unbelievable that this is intended to feed two people, as it is more suited to feeding a family of four!  Plus, it even came with thick-cut bacon.  The only PITA element was making the whipped cream.  I usually praise dishes with homemade whipped cream, but omitting any powdered sugar made it really time-consuming to whip by hand.

The dish was both hefty and impressive.  We fed our family of five (granted, a few of us are pretty small), and still had lots of leftovers.  The toppings — pineapple caramel sauce, homemade whipped cream, and maraschino cherries — made the dish all the more decadent.

Seared Ribeye With Caprese Salad With Pesto-Garlic Bread.  25-35 mins, easy, 882 cal per serving.

I loved the simplicity of this dish.  The balsamic glaze and the pesto were already prepared, so a lot of the work was already done.  This meal was really as simple as cooking the steak, halving tomatoes, and chopping some garlic.  Everything was sooo good — there is nothing like a nice steak, and the Caprese salad was super-tasty.  This reminded me of a delicious Atkins-type meal, except with tons of garlic bread!  Both portions are shown above, but it was still a lot of food.

Honey Butter Fried Chicken With Green Beans and Biscuits. 45-55mins, intermediate, 854 cal per serving.

The fried chicken was really delicious, but it was a difficult meal to make properly.  Having no bones to help conduct the heat, the chicken breast plumped and took a long time to cook through, which meant having to turn it several times.  Because a boneless cut of meat contracts and plumps, the breading can become loose.  The breading of the chicken was actually quite easy, and the taste and seasoning was fabulous.  I loved the biscuits — the recipe made about three times as much honey butter as any human should eat with one meal!  The green beans were OK, but I actually moved this meal up in our planning order because the beans were starting to look tired.

Spaghetti With Ricotta Meatballs with Pecorino Garlic Bread. 40-50 mins, easy, 858 cal per serving.

Yum!  Spaghetti and meatballs are a crowd pleaser (double portion shown), and really easy to make.  This version involved a quick pan fry, followed by cooking in the sauce.  I like this method the best, as baking meatballs makes a mess, and cooking wholly in sauce is time consuming and makes fragile, crustless meatballs.  These had a lovely flavor and delicate texture.  Garlic bread is a natural accompaniment to this meal, despite the extra dose of carbs.

This week was absolutely superb from a comfort food standpoint — big, delicious portions of rich, satisfying food that was easy to put together in a brief amount of time.  Home Chef has a huge selection of meal options to choose from each week, and the portions are very generous!  They offer breakfast selections, and there is even an option to get a fruit basket (BTW, we’ve gotten the fruit a couple of times and found it to be really nice — sweet but not overripe).

Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?

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