Home Chef September 2016 Review & Coupon

This was another strong week for Home Chef – and we still went all out with a breakfast and fruit basket!

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 order of preparation abandons strict adherence to mise-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 shows 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).

Pine Nut & Goat Cheese Bucatini Alfredo with garlic bread. 25-35 minutes, easy, 981 calories per serving.

This dish was even easier than most, as there was no true chopping to do. The bucatini was a pleasant alternative to regular spaghetti, and the goat cheese added a fabulous depth of flavor to the sauce. It poured on thin but thickened as it cooled, making for great supping!

Creamy Sausage And Mushroom Pasta with Garlic Bread. 30-40 minutes, easy, 1023 calories per serving.

Another Alfredo-esque dish, this one relied on campanelle pasta for a bit of texture and cremini mushrooms and sausage to amp up the flavor. It was relatively simple to put together, but the roasting of the umami ingredients required a bit of patience in an otherwise quick dish.

Texas Toast Breakfast Sandwich with Bacon-Infused Steak Fries. 30-40 minutes, easy, 949 calories per serving.

Possibly our favorite of the batch. Big toasts, lots of bacon, bacon-infused steak fries, a smothering of cheddar, what’s not to love? Even the spinach was superb – it added a bit of counter-note to the sweet and greasy, but it wasn’t intrusive enough to rain on the parade, either. I failed to capture it, but each portion actually had an extra slice of bacon on the side!  Not too hard to put together, so long as you have your coffee first.

Steak With Brown Butter Bordelaise with Brussels Sprouts And Roasted Potatoes. 35-45 minutes, easy, 734 calories per serving.

While the Brussels sprouts were good, they couldn’t compete with the awesomeness that was the steak and potato combo at the heart of this dish. I broke out my cast iron pan for the potatoes, so they were crispy and totally infused with olive oil. The brown butter sauce and steak were, of course, beautiful, and the trio made for a feast that was like fine French and diner fusion. The potato prep was slightly fussy, but well worth it!

A coupon was included for a free Graze trial, an offer we also have on the site.

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!