Home Chef September 2016 Review & Coupon

This week we made sure to get the always-great fruit basket and one of our Home Chef favorites — BBQ Chicken Pizza!  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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each recipe was packed separately, and neatly, in its own bag, except for a few larger items.  Unless otherwise noted, each of the pictures of prepared food below show one of two servings made by each recipe.

Seasonal Fruit Selection With Honeycrisp & Red Delicious Apples, Anjou & Bosc Pears.  They gave us six pieces of fruit in this pear/apple selection, versus the four pieces we’ve received when the selection comprises larger or more exotic fruit.  As always, the fruit is ripe, yet firm (though we gave the pears a few days to ripen further).

Fig-Glazed Pork Tenderloin With Roasted Brussels Sprouts And Carrots. 35-45 minutes, easy, 535 calories per serving.

This combo balances the nutty and slightly bitter roast Brussels sprouts with caramelized carrot and shallot, and a fig and wine reduction.  the pork was very tender and plays the part of a pleasantly neutral palette upon which the robust vegetables and sauce play.  I dropped the ball and misplaced the goat cheese when it was time to plate the dish, so it is absent from the photo (whoops!).  It is the perfect finish to the dish, complementing both the wine and fig similar to the way it does beets in a salad.  There is a bit of chopping in prepping this dish, but then the oven does all the work!

Wood-Fired Bbq Chicken Pizza With Cheddar Cheese, Caramelized Onions, And Ranch Drizzle. 25-35 minutes, easy, 862 calories per serving.

This is one of our favorites!  It is super-easy to throw together, with just a little time spent on the front end caramelizing the onions and searing the chicken.  The naan is extremely versatile and makes a superb pizza crust with no hassle.  This dish has everything you love about BBQ chicken pizza (though I wouldn’t complain if bacon were thrown in, too), and the little bit of vegetable sprinkled on at the end works very well with the dish, adding a bit of fresh crunch and balancing the sweetness of the sauce with a touch of slightly bitter greens.  This is one of two pizzas — you each get your own pie!

Flat Iron Steak And Fines Herbes Butter With Garlic, Potato, And Red Pepper Hash. 40-50 minutes, easy, 575 calories per serving.

The herb butter is obviously provided in greater quantity than is required for the already-flavorful and moist steak, but it went well with the veggies, too.  This dish is pleasantly simple to make, with the vegetables prepared in a one-pot meal style.  It made for a hearty and well-balanced side to go with the luxurious and unctuous steak.

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!