Home Chef sent me a “come back” offer of $25 off per week for four weeks, so I’ve been back using it. The service has grown up a bit since the last time I used it. For one, meals have different prices now. While before they all used to be $10 per serving, they now have a weekly “slow cooker” meal for $7.50, and their more upscale meals (including the one that has steak) are $12/13 per portion). You can now further customize these with more expensive proteins – a meal kit that includes choice boneless ribeye steak will cost you $24 per portion, or the same you can expect to pay at a restaurant. Of course, the choices of these more expensive proteins, including antibiotic-free chicken, does send the message that their regular proteins are pretty crappy.
Home Chef seems to have a greater variety of dishes now, including some with an international flare, but most everything they offer is directed to very standard American tastes. And it’s sending more prepared ingredients, which means that it’s far quicker to put these meals together. They also have almost oven-ready meals, which require very little preparation.
My first week back on Home Chef I got:
Crispy Orange Chicken with jasmine rice and broccoli
This was a pretty straightforward dish and quick to prepare. The chicken was pre-cubed and the orange sauce pre-made, so there wasn’t too much to do: make the race, roast the broccoli, mix the coating, coat the chicken, fry it and then mix it with the orange sauce. I like that they included the oil, as it took quite a bit to fry it.
It was a fairly tasty dish, not quite restaurant quality but good enough. Still, I wouldn’t eagerly order it again.
Steak Pad Thai with peanuts and cilantro
This was another fairly easy dish to put together and tasty enough. It did not, however, taste at all like Thai pad thai. That’s because it used oyster sauce, rather than the sauce used for pad thai. I appreciated that the carrots came pre-shredded, that saved me a lot of time. The steak also came pre-cut in paper thin slices, which I couldn’t have done myself manually and made cooking it very fast. While I liked the dish well enough, I wouldn’t order it again if I had better options.
Sun-Dried Tomato Mozzarella Chicken with Garlic Butter Green Beans
This was one of those almost oven ready meals. It still required washing and seasoning the green beans, cooking them and then adding the chicken, spreading it with tomato pesto and covering with cheese before baking, but it was all rather quick to put together. The pesto came already made. I didn’t actually taste this dish, but my daughter was pleased enough with it.
In all, these meals were fine – not as tasty as the ones I got from Hello Fresh the week before, but far quicker to put together. Though at the end, it seemed like I could do so just as easily with stuff I bought at the supermarket and, was I paying full price, probably for less.
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