Home Chef Subscription Box Review + Coupon – September 2017

Home Chef is a subscription meal delivery service that delivers you a weekly box of the pre-portioned ingredients you need to make two to six meals that feed two, four, or six people. Home Chef advertises easy recipes that can be made in about 30 minutes. They say their ingredients are fresh (though they don't provide a lot of information about their sourcing practices), and they offer vegetarian, gluten-free, and calorie/carb-conscious recipes.

This is a review of the plan I customized that includes a mix of beef, fish, poultry, and vegetarian options (starting at $9.95 per serving) for two people, three meals a week ($59.70 per week). Delivery is free for orders over $45. Shipping is $10 for orders less than $45.

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My Subscription Addiction pays for this subscription. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes.)

The Subscription Box: Home Chef

The Cost: Meals start at $9.95 per serving, and delivery is free for orders over $40.

The Products: Fresh ingredients and chef-designed recipes— everything you need to make restaurant-quality meals at home.

Ships to: 90% of the U.S. (You can check to see if Home Chef delivers to your zip code here.)

Check out all of our Home Chef reviews and find other meal kit boxes in the Food Subscription Box Directory!

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When you first sign up for Home Chef, you take a short quiz about your meal preferences and dietary restrictions. I like that they ask what you like to eat, as well a what you like to avoid. Based on your answers, Home Chef will choose recipes for you to get each week. As is the case with most meal kit services, you can log in and hand-select the recipes you'd like to receive. Note though, that the more particular you are with your diet, the fewer options you'll have. I'm pretty open to most proteins, so I currently have 11 different options for next week. There are also some "Add On" items like fruit or smoothie picks that you can choose to include in your box.

Each Home Chef meal comes in a plastic bag, except for the meat, and some ingredients that are too large (such as ears of corn).

Grilled Pork Chop with Dijon Cream

Calories: 621

Time to Table, According to Home Chef: 25-35 minutes

Actual Time to Table: 25 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

The front of the recipe card has nutrition, prep and cook time, spice level, difficulty level, and a unique stat: how many days you have to prepare this meal for optimum quality and freshness. Pork chops have six days, which makes me feel more at ease than some of the fish that only has three days.

This recipe has pretty minimal ingredients and was relatively easy to prepare. You'll see what I mean as you read on.

After prepping the corn, shallots, parsley, and thyme, it was already time to cook the chops. I'm not accustomed to cooking meat bone-in, so I was a bit weary for no real reason. One of the tips they gave on the recipe card was to cut shallow slits two inches apart along the edge of the pork to keep it from "curling". This totally helped and was a tip I didn't know, so I'm glad they included it! I seasoned them with the included smoked sea salt with a bit of pepper and into the grill pan they went.

After the meat was cooked, I set it aside and covered it with foil before putting the corn in the grill pan. Cooking vegetables in the grill pan has become one of my least favorite things these days. Even when I properly coat the pan with cooking spray (as directed), I feel like it just smokes up my whole house without properly cooking the veggies. I had the corn on here for much longer than called for and I still feel like it wasn't done very well. Sigh.

The only thing left to do was make the dijon cream sauce. I added the chopped shallots to a pan with oil to saute a bit before adding the cooking wine. After that, I added the cream and thyme and cooked until it thickened. It smelled really wonderful!

Here is the finished meal with parsley for garnish (plus some smoked sea salt on the corn)! I think the cream got a little too thick, so it wasn't as saucy as it could be, but it still tasted great.

I was pleased with my first bone-in pork chop adventure. It was super moist and flavorful. Like I said, the corn could have been cooked more thoroughly but I will have to figure out how to master cooking it on the gril pan.

Chicken Milanesa

Calories: 821

Time to Table According to Home Chef: 25-35 minutes

Actual Time to Table: About 30 minutes

Difficulty: Intermediate

I don't do a whole lot of breading with most meal kits, so I was glad to see this option when I was choosing my recipes. I also love lemon aioli!

The breading is the most difficult part of this receipe, so this one was a breeze to prepare as well. Most of the ingredients were going into the side salad.

Clearly I burnt the almonds. 🙁 They still tasted alright though!

Okay, so the first thing they want you to do is butterfly the chicken. In theory, I know what that means, but something about how the directions were written really confused me for no reason. I think I was just in a rush whole cooking, so I wasn't thinking clearly. It says "make a lengthwise cut through the center, using your free hand to steady the chicken. Stop short at the opposite edge so it remains in one piece and open like a book". Looking back, I now realize what they meant, but at the time, I thought "lengthwise" was cutting it from top to bottom, in the center, then I was like "this doesn't open like a book!". I was supposed to essentially cut it in half with the knife parallel with the countertop. ANYHOW, I got frustrated and bascially didn't even bother butterflying it. I just covered it in plastic wrap and pounded it with a heavy pan to even out it's thickness.

I took the two chicken breasts and breaded them as directed, but using plates instead of bowls like they suggested. I like having a shallow vessel to move them around in. They look pretty good!

I then added them to hot canola oil (which they included) in a pan to fry. The got a really nice golden brown after three minutes on each side, then one more addition minute again on the first side. They were then put into my oven for four minutes at 425 degrees to finish!

While the chicken was in the oven, I made the dressing for the salad which was just olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper. I also whipped up the aioli which was just the included mayo with lemon zest, and pepper (which I sadly forgot to snap a picture of).

Here are my pretty golden babies out of the oven.

Here we have the finished meal with the lemon aioli on the side to dip that yummy breaded chicken into!!

This meal was super delicious because it's fried chicken and you can never go wrong with that. The light side salad (with toasted almonds on top) was a great pairing! The chicken also turned out really moist, like the pork chops, and now I know how to make some easy chicken!

Verdict: I loved both of my Home Chef meals this week and each was super duper easy to make with very little prepping involved. Their meals are $9.95 per serving which is totally worth it to me, knowing I cooked it myself and learned something new. I also don't have any produce that's going to go bad in my refrigerator and no leftovers I will feel guilty about throwing away later. As always, I think this meal kit is great for people who don't have the will to think up something new to cook each night and have a hard time using up the food they overbuy at the grocery store. 

What did you get from Home Chef this week?