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.
Home Chef and Fargo are partnering until the premiere of the award-winning series.
One of the meal choices each week leading up to the premier is an ode to the kind of hometown cookin’ enjoyed by, don’t cha’ know, folks in the series. You’ll also get a chance to win a special kitchen gift if you order a meal with the Fargo logo.
All of the provided ingredients for our six 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.
Spring Fruit Basket With Kiwis, Gala Apples, Bosc Pear, And Orange. 195 calories per serving: Home Chef’s fruit is always really nice. It is firm, but ripe enough to eat when it arrives – we’ve never received overripe or mangled fruit in the basket. It is flavorful, too. All-around good quality.
Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps With Water Chestnuts And Sesame Dipping Sauce. 25-35 minutes, easy, 625 calories per serving.
This is one of our favorite dishes, and we get it whenever it pops up among the choices. The ground pork, cooked in a sriracha and ginger spiked Hunan sauce, is tender, crisped a bit, sweet, and a little spicy. Shredded cabbage, onion, and fresh cilantro add a nice crunch and freshness. I recommend giving this dish even to those wary of the lettuce cups – the meat mixture has enough going on that the meal as a whole is about as much like a salad as a taco salad is. The lettuce works surprisingly well as a wrap, but your fingers will still get a bit messy! It is incredibly easy to put together, especially with the cabbage pre-shredded. The dish is relatively light compared to some other options, but it packs huge flavor and is fun to eat. We don’t use much of the Asian Sesame dressing provided, as the dish doesn’t need more than a drizzle – it’s good for using on any extra lettuce leaves.
Texas-Style Steak on Toast With Smashed Red Potatoes and Red Onion Gravy. 30-40 minutes, easy, 841 calories per serving.
This dish was very tasty, with a nice range of textures to enjoy – it was a nice downhome spin on steak and potatoes. The steak itself was flavorful and tender, and the gravy was built with a demi-glace, so it had all the meaty flavor you could ask for. The potatoes were loaded with butter and sour cream, so the gravy was mainly for sopping up with the toast. Though it upped the carbs a bit, the toast was a perfect addition, and I liked scooping meat onto it, creating an open-face steak sandwich. This dish had a several parts to it, but each was easy in itself, with timing everything to be ready at the same time being the only, albeit modest, challenge.
This was a great couple of meals for us! We don’t always need five nights of meals (sometimes you actually have dinner plans outside the house), and it’s nice to have the flexibility to adjust the number of meals and servings, or to be able to grab some fruit instead. We loved our two choices – one light and flavorful, and one a hearty gut-buster.
Have you tried Home Chef? What did you think of your meals?
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