My first experience with a meal kit and delivery service: Home Chef

Something I wish I did at home more often was cook. The times I do it, I find it to be enjoyable except trying to find what to eat, getting the recipe and finding all the ingredients at the grocery store. Fortunately, there are many services out there that handle most of that for you. Over the past decade, meal kit and food delivery companies have been popping up. It’s something family and friends of mine have tried and asked me to look into.

I decided to go ahead and give one of them a try when I saw an ad pop up for Home Chef. It came up on Groupon. The deal was for two weeks of three meals for two people at a little over $40. Knowing how much I spend eating out, I figured that was a good deal and pulled the trigger.

Once my order was placed, I went over to the Home Chef website and was presented with over a dozen options of meals to choose from. It was a nice presentation that showed pictures of the meals, cooking times, nutritional information, difficulty level for cooking, and the ability to customize the meals.

The meals I selected included:

• Mahi-Mahi and Tuscan Herb Sauce
• Dijon Crusted Steak
• Crispy Orange Chicken
• Mediterranean Turkey Meatballs and Gemelli
• Tomato Cream Rigatoni
• Chinese Pork Lettuce Wraps with Sesame Dipping Sauce

Once a week over a two-week period, this big box appeared on my doorstep.

Inside the box was all the material I would need to cook every meal along with instructional sheets to walk me through it. The recipe cards were easy to read, included multiple pictures and outlined everything we had to do. I felt like I was in Home Ec class.

Everything was very straightforward and the food came sealed up in individual zip lock bags for me to place in the fridge. Every protein, spice, sauce, vegetable, etc was in its own bag so that was nice. Here’s some of the food we made over that time.

We ordered all the meals with an easy to medium difficulty level. Like all foods, some dishes were better than others. We were quite impressed with the quality of the food. My expectations were VERY LOW going into it. The serving sizes were definitely smaller but I think that was to be expected going into it.

Of all the dishes we had, the pasta dishes were probably our favorites compared to the rest. The tomato cream rigatoni was the highlight of the six dishes we made.

For our first experience into a meal delivery subscription service, we were happy with what we received. Nothing deterred us from trying Home Chef or a competing service in the future. I would certainly do it again to mix and match what we are eating throughout the week.

I may have to start doing 2-week trials to all the other services to see which one I like best.

Happy Dining,
Eddy