Home Chef October 2016 Review & Coupon

We never seem to get tired of the Home Chef breakfast offerings, so we snagged another one this week! Home Chef is a meal in a box subscription – every week, you 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 set-up (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 a giant bag to protect against leakage and to let you get the meat out without fishing around. They now stamp the inside of the box with inspection stamps, so we know that no fewer than two people have inspected our box before it ships!

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 such as 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 prep is done is a sensible order, with long lead time items first. This helps everything finish cooking close to the same time. The recipe cards have pre-punched holes so you can store them in a recipe binder – we usually prefer to just wait till the recipe is offered again instead of attempting to gather the ingredients to recreate it ourselves.

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 shows one of two servings made by each recipe.

Churro French Toast With Nutella Drizzle And Breakfast Sausage Links. 25-35 minutes, easy, 789 calories per serving.

Yes, these were as good as they sound – and yes, that is really a single serving pictured! This was a very sweet dish, but not so much so that we didn’t eat it for breakfast! I loved the sausage, too. They were very snappy and had a real casing. Very easy dish to make, too – which breakfast has to be. This meal fed our entire family of five.

Spicy Jerked Pork Skewers With Coconut Cauliflower And Roasted Lemon Kale. 35-45 minutes, intermediate, 529 calories per serving.

This dish was OK. The pork was tender and flavorful, but the jerk sauce was a little too sweet and mild for our tastes – I was expecting allspice, onions, and lots of Scotch Bonnet! The coconut cauliflower was good, but the lemony treatment failed to make the kale into something other than kale. I found the difficulty level very manageable – the pork chops were easy to work with, and the cauliflower prep was actually easier than most steaming, boiling, or roasting protocols.

Acapulco Steak Tacos With Pico De Gallo And Cilantro-Lime Rice. 30-40 minutes, easy, 887 calories per serving.

Yum! These were our hands-down favorites of the week! The steak was flavorful and relatively tender, and the fresh pico de gallo and cheese toppings were the bomb. The mixture of sour cream and Cotija cheese had a creamy and sour bite, similar to feta – we each independently concluded that the tacos had an almost Greek feel to them, and they could have passed as such had the tortillas been thicker. Relatively easy chopping-centric prep and well worth it!

Grilled Pork Chop With Whole Grain Dijon Sauce With Green Beans And Red Potatoes. 30-40 minutes, easy, 590 calories per serving.

This dish is simple, classic, and very satisfying. We love roasted potatoes, so it’s hard to go wrong there. I prepared the beans in a pan instead of the prescribed grilling, as I didn’t feel like losing literally half of them through the grate. The pork was very good – though it doesn’t fall apart like the pressure cooker pork chops Brandy grew up with, it is butterknife tender. We liked the mustard-thyme sauce, as the mustard wasn’t overpowering.

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 do a great job with these dishes, 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!