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 instructions delivered to your door. The basic concept is the same as other weekly meal delivery services, but it has its own unique features and recipes. Their meal options include include many great Asian, Indian, African, and South American inspired dishes, along with more traditional American home-style and steakhouse fare.
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).
DEAL: Get $30 of free food when you sign up – just use this link to get the deal!
The food is packed in puffy, padded cooler pads, with each meal packed in a separate bag containing nearly everything needed to make a complete meal. The box is always packed with several ice packs.
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. 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 – they even include liquid egg (instead of expecting you to have eggs on hand), and oil for shallow-frying when a recipe calls for more than a few tablespoons worth.
The back of the card has the actual recipe guidance, complete with pictures and bold-facing 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. I love that they include a heads-up for when ingredients are divided and used in different parts of the dish.
The prep is done is a sensible order – items with long lead times are started first, chopping is done all at once when it makes sense to do so, but they’ll also have you do some of the latter stage prep while other food is cooking, shortening the overall prep time. The recipe cards have pre-punched holes so you can store them in a recipe binder, but we usually prefer to just wait till the recipe is offered again instead of attempting to gather the ingredients to recreate it ourselves.
All of the provided ingredients for our four recipes this week. 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.
In celebration of the new season of Fargo on FX, Home Chef has featured a home style meal each week with a Fargo flair. Our box even had a special surprise this week!
This apron is actually the highest quality apron we’ve received in a box. Many boxes have novelty aprons every once in a while, but this one is thick and well made with a stitched logo and two front pockets.
Three Cheese Brown Butter Mac With Parmesan-Roasted Zucchini And Roma Tomatoes. 40-50 minutes, easy, 979 calories per serving.
This Fargo-themed dish was incredibly cheesy and delicious. When I transferred the mixture to a casserole dish, the entire batch clung together from all the cheese! The Panko topping was delicate and crisp, a perfect complement. The roasted veggies rounded out the meal and balanced the extreme gooeyness of the mac. Very easy to make, too.
It made a lot of food! Pictured are both servings. The only problem with this dish is that, after eating this version, I may never get my daughter to eat boxed mac and cheese again!
Beef & Pepper Tamale Pie With Cornbread-Cheddar Crust. 45-55 minutes, easy, 822 calories per serving.
This one-pot wonder is like a delicious chili and shepherd’s pie mashup. The filling was wonderfully seasoned, and the peppers added a very pleasant level of heat. The cornbread topping really made it into a meal. Even mixing the cornbread, it was easy and had little clean-up.
Blue Cheese-Crusted Sirloin Steak With Roasted Fingerlings, Carrots, And Horseradish Cream. 30-40 minutes, easy, 910 calories per serving.
The steak was great – tender and flavorful. The mound of topping was huge, and it made the dish very filling. I loved the horseradish sauce and the naturally sweet carrots. Everything was so good that the roasted fingerlings didn’t stand out, and that is saying a lot! Lots of components, but easy to make and very elegant looking.
Parsley-Caper Pork Medallions With Warm Cauliflower Salas. 25-35 minutes, easy, 590 calories per serving.
The pork medallions were very tender, and the caper and parsley topping added a superb briny and floral accent that set the dish apart. The lightly dressed roasted veggie salad was crunchy and made the meal feel very healthy and satisfying. Super easy to make, too!
I loved this set of meals. The Tamale Pie and the Brown Butter Mac were the ultimate duo in comfort foods, and the other two dishes expertly leveraged a potent ingredient (blue cheese and capers) to set off the whole dish. No matter kind of cuisine, Home Chef always seems to find a way to make it really satisfying. Home Chef is also very convenient and easy to do – though they include difficulty ratings on the meals, none require extraordinary skill, and the more “complicated” dishes usually just involve an extra step or two – all the meals are easy for anyone with modest cooking skills. The great number of delicious and interesting meal options makes it our go-to meal subscription for everyday eating.
Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?
Comments