Home Chef September 2016 Review & Coupon

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This week’s Home Chef selections featured an awesome, simple twist on quiche Lorraine!  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).

The total value of this box is $59.70.

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This week, our food was packed within an arrangement of puffy, padded cooler pads.  The food is segregated in bags, and 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 rather than expecting you to have eggs on hand, and they even include a bottle of oil for shallow-frying when a recipe calls for more than a few tablespoons worth.

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The box is always packed with a sufficient number of ice packs — the meat is placed in the bottom of the box with several of them.  I like that they now put all the meat in giant bag to protect against leakage and to let you get the meat out without fishing around.

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The recipe cards display prep time, difficulty,  a “best cooked by” time frame, and even a spice level.  There is also a list of stuff you may need from your own kitchen, like cookware and salt and pepper.

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The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures and boldfacing of ingredients.  The recipes are accompanied by pro-tips and explanations of cooking terminology and techniques.  The tips appear in a sidebar so they don’t clutter the actual recipe.

The order of preparation abandons strict adherence to mis-en-place, instead instructing you 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.

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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.

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Dijon And Panko-Crusted Chicken With Roasted Carrots And Garlic Mashed Potatoes. 30-40 minutes, intermediate, 771 calories per serving.

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This was a simple and straightforward dish.  The carrots and potatoes were excellent, with lots of flavor and nice texture.  The Dijon mustard technique for coating the chicken works very well and produces a nice crust in concert with the panko, but the flavor of the large volume of unadulterated Dijon is a bit strong — I think a Dijonnaise would produce a more subtle result without compromising the integrity of the coating.  The chicken itself is also a bit “springy,” with a denser texture than expected.  This dish was easy to make, but the chicken was disappointing.

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Chicken With Green Peppercorn Sauce With Mashed Carrots And Roasted Broccoli. 35-45 minutes, intermediate, 600 calories per serving.

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The roasting brings out a ton of great flavor in the broccoli, and the carrots had a lovely fresh flavor, making a superb stand-in for potatoes.  The sauce was to die for!  The briny green peppercorns and shallot gave the creamy sauce a very French feel, and it certainly added a touch of elegance to the dish along with the wonderful flavor.  Everything in this dish was easy to make.  Frying the chicken without a coating rendered a better result than that of the Dijon-crusted chicken, but it still had a bit of tightness and spring to it.  I think we are taking a break from the chicken for awhile, since we are not enjoying it as much as the other meats.

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Pork Shumai Meatballs With Ponzu Dipping Sauce, Sugar Snap Peas, And Rice. 25-35 minutes, easy, 622 calories per serving.

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We loved this dish!  Pork, Asian sauce, and crunchy snap peas — what’s not to love!  Very easy to throw together, so long as you don’t mind getting your hands a little messy!  This one had great flavor and texture, with a nice simple dipping sauce and a mound of rice to stretch the dish and absorb all the great flavor.

Home Chef tends to be the most mainstream of the meal kit subscriptions, featuring dishes that are familiar and comforting.  Home Chef has always had a huge selection of meal options to choose from each week, and it is the undisputed portion king of the meal kit subscriptions!   They have also been adding some more exotic and adventurous offerings to the mix, with Indian, Southeast Asian, and African dishes appearing as choices.  I think they did a great job with these offerings, providing both quality and novelty.  In addition to great dinner options, they also offer breakfast selections and a fruit basket (which we have been very happy with whenever we’ve gotten it).

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

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!

The Subscription: Home Chef
The Description: Receive fresh ingredients and visual, step-by-step recipe cards on your selected delivery day every week. Cook like a seasoned chef in your own kitchen with ease.
The Price: $60.00 every week
See Home Chef in the Hello Subscription Box Directory!
The Categories: .
The Reviews: See all our Home Chef Reviews.

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