By: Revanche

Home Chef Review

March 23, 2021

The last two times we tried meal delivery services was a free trial of Gobble three or four years ago, then maybe a free trial of Blue Apron two years ago? I honestly can’t remember.

The point is, we’ve tried our best to keep doing our own shopping and cooking because we prefer doing our own grocery shopping and most of the time I enjoy cooking.

As with so many other things in 2020, the pandemic has shifted our thinking on that a bit. Or a lot. We got pretty sick of planning, prepping, and cooking every single meal every single day.  Still, it wasn’t until Smol Acrobat arrived  and until friends gave us a nudge that we actually did anything about this. They gifted us a gift card to the Home Chef service which we’d never heard of before and we had to set up a subscription to use it. At first I was mildly annoyed, mostly at the way Home Chef is set up, but once we were in the system I found that my annoyance was more than abated by how much it helps us each week.

We only opted for 2 meals (4 servings of each) per week to start and used it for several weeks. I appreciate the assist on two meals twice a week. Here are some of my observations from using the service.

Cost

The regular meals are $8.99 per serving, salads are $6.99 per serving. We felt like that was a reasonable price: it falls in between the lowest dollar cost of our picking and shopping for our own ingredients and the highest dollar cost of take out with no preparation involved.

Because we had received a few gift cards, we used the $90 off promotion code that is spread across 4 boxes/4 weeks to get the full $90 off.

If we had not received those gift cards, I would have used my friend’s referral code for $35 off instead. That gives more money off the first box and less commitment for a trial if you just wanted to give it one try.

The set up

Honestly, I didn’t like their site set up one bit. It didn’t work the way I expected. I like getting all my information up front: sample menus, cost, etc. With them, I had to sign up for an account first, and to do that, you had to agree to a subscription. Awfully forward of you considering I hadn’t had a chance to consider the meals yet! Since I had a gift certificate to use up anyway, I went ahead with the account creation. I called their customer service to ask about how I’d add a promo code and the phone customer service person was totally clueless and gave me totally wrong information. So that was two strikes right off the bat.

The meal options

They have several groups for their meals: Culinary Collection, the premium meal options which are more expensive and you do your own prep work; Meal Kit, you do your own prep work; Fast and Fresh, usually no prep work but you do some cooking; Oven Ready, no real prep but you do plop things into a pan and stick it in the over; 15-minute meal kit, some minor prep and cooking required; Entree Salad, some minor prep and assembly required.

Box 1

I was unpleasantly surprised to discover my assumption that the oven ready meals would be totally ready to pop into the ovenwas wrong. Nope, still had to do some prep to get it ready for cooking. Boo hisssss. But it wasn’t much work. It’s just that any work was greater than the zero amount of work I wanted to do.

Verdict: The meals were pretty good last week but nothing I felt strongly about repeating.

Box 2

Mediterranean Shrimp with Couscous and Feta Cheese
Mojito Lime Salad

Verdict: I was mildly skeptical about this week’s selections so figured to give myself plenty of time to work it out. I wasn’t expecting better than ok this week but the Mojito Lime Salad and the Mediterranean Shrimp with couscous were both surprisingly excellent! I’ve recreated the couscous recipe from scratch since trying this one.

I was pleased that half the containers were reusable. We need this assist right now in meal prep but I hate plastic waste so anything we can reuse or anyplace we can reduce waste is appreciated.

Box 3

Pulled Pork Enchilada Skillet with Lime Crema
Creamy Truffle Chicken Skillet with Mushrooms and Green Beans

Verdict: I was very much not in the mood for mushrooms this week so I left them out, but the rest of the recipes were excellent.

Box 4

Garlic Herb and Butter Cracker-Crusted Pork Chop with Root Vegetables
Chicken Thigh Shawarma Wild Rice Bowl with Tzatziki Sauce

Verdict: We’ll be adding butter crackers to more of our meats 🙂 They were tasty. The shawarma was absolutely perfect though and the serving size was great even for us. We are big eaters and while I am struggling with my appetite, I still need a lot of food to feel even close to “not empty” and these recipes came through.

Box 5

Spinach and Ricotta Ravioli Bolognese with Parmesan
BBQ Cheddar Meatballs with Bacon Potatoes

Verdict: Oh right, turns out you have to FORM YOUR OWN MEATBALLS. The recipe was delicious but I was grumpy about the hands on aspect of the meatballs. I tried to recreate this an easy and lazy way – skipping the forming of the meatballs part – but it did not translate. Maybe you really DO need to make the meatballs for the beef to work.

The ravioli bolognese was good and super easy to throw together.

Box 6

Creamy Salsa Verde Steak Strips with Mexican Rice

Verdict: This was a hit – totally delicious and easy to make. I’d definitely make this again even if JB did poopoo the cilantro lime rice. Philistine.

Drawbacks

They assign two default meals a week and if you want to change or customize this, you have to pick your meals by noon Friday before the week of delivery. When your week gets busy, it can be easy to blow that deadline. I had the meals worked out ahead of time for a few weeks and that was great. BUT predictably the week that PiC went back to work, I was distracted, lost track of days and didn’t pick two meals, just one. The shipping went from $7 to $14 on that ONE meal. I did ask them to credit me for that shipping overcharge and they obliged.

They don’t have chat services and they’re not open all the time. Their customer service hours are: Monday-Friday: 9am-6pm CST; Saturday: 10am-2pm CST; Sunday: Closed. Their email seems to be tended by a small or single staffer and she’s been really good.

Final verdict

The meal portions are really good, even for our family that tends to eat a lot. The cost works out ok for the type of service we’re paying for, though I don’t love that we pay for shipping. I still want to have more already prepared foods some days, like take out, but this has actually let me enjoy cooking again while making it a little less time consuming. That’s a nice compromise. Plus I get a binder of recipe cards to refer back to later in case I want to try and recreate recipes that we liked a lot.

We’ll keep using them for a little longer unless/until we find another option that comes more pre-made with less wasteful packaging.

If it weren’t for the kids, I swear I’d have regressed to a state of existence that subsisted solely on protein bars for a week.

:: How have you been managing the endless need to prepare meals for yourself and/or your family?

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