Home Chef Review

Guys, I have made a great discovery.  Healthy meals that look like they came from a restaurant are not hard to make.  They have been lying to us all these years.  I don’t know who they are, but they have definitely been trying to make us think that cooking is hard.  IT’S NOT!  I do a lot of home cooking, but not really anything fancy, until last week.  Last week I tried Home Chef and I made a fancy, healthy meal.  AND IT WASN’T HARD!  It took some time, yes, but with the help of Home Chef (which does not mean a chef comes to your home, FYI.  That’s a different thing and you need to be Oprah rich), I made a pretty fancy meal, if I do say so myself! ***This post contains affiliate links.  If you click one and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no cost to you!***                    

You Can Cook a Healthy, Fancy Meal With Home Chef

Home Chef is a service that creates delicious recipes, packages all of the ingredients and then sends them to your door!  You get to pick out the meals you want to make, how many servings you need and how often you want them sent (weekly, bi-weekly or monthly) and the food arrives ready to be prepped and cooked at your doorstep in a cute box that is totally refrigerated.  The first meal I made was Bone-In Pork Chop with Pecorino-Garlic Butter.  Which is gluten free, in case you are interested.  Home Chef notes which recipes will work with certain allergies.  Yay!

Everything arrives neat as a pin and well packaged.  The contents of my box included two separate meals with enough to feed a family of four.  The food is surrounded by ice packs and then the box is lined with insulated packaging that keeps everything cold and cushioned.

I love that the food comes with a cookbook that you can keep the recipes in.  The recipes are printed in color on thick paper, so they are fairly durable.  The cook book comes with a great insert with info on kitchen tools you might need, how to safely store and prepare food and a description of some of the more chef-y terms, like chiffonade.  That insert immediately made me think that this would be such a great gift for a newly married couple, or a recent grad who hasn’t a clue how to cook and no time to shop for food.  

The first thing I noticed as I started sorting things out was that the food looked nice and fresh.  Check out these pretty pork chops:

Pork chops on the bone are not something I would normally buy, neither are full length carrots, but I’m glad I chose this meal.  I snuck a few bites of carrots as I was chopping them and they were delicious.  Definitely different, fresher I guess, than what I have bought at the grocery store.  And the pork chops looked beautiful, even uncooked.  

I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh peas like the ones that Home Chef sent to me. They were stored in a little container and they were a beautiful bright green, but not frozen.  I adored these veggies.  They were cooked stove top with some seriously good honey.  I would never have thought of cooking carrots and peas like this, which is another great bonus of Home Chef.  My culinary skills have definitely expanded!

And the fanciest part of the meal was the Pecorino Garlic Butter that you top the chop with.  I have never made a blended butter before, but it’s something I definitely want to try to do again with other ingredients.  It was much easier than I thought it would be.  

And, by the way, Home Chef even sends you butter.  There are a few things they expect you to have in your pantry, like olive oil and salt and pepper, but other than that, they really think of everything.  This is perhaps my favorite feature of Home Chef.  I don’t have to think about grocery shopping.  I get to do only the fun parts of cooking.  Chopping stuff up and, well, cooking.

Just to keep things 100% real, my two teeny tiny complaints are that the meal took a little longer to prepare than I usually like to spend and there was an inordinate amount of packaging.  As far as the time, I did force myself to work slowly so that I wouldn’t mess up the recipe, so that is probably a factor in the additional time.  And as for the packaging, Home Chef does also give you information on how to properly dispose of the ice packs and insulation that come in the box.  Everything in the box is recyclable.  I kept a few of the ice packs in the freezer for when/if warm weather ever comes to the North East again.

I am looking forward to making the second recipe that I ordered, Sherry Wine Demi-Glace Sirloin Steak!, and I have scheduled two meals to arrive monthly!  I love trying new foods, so this is going to be so fun for me!  I love that I get to learn new cooking methods and add some fancy recipes to my repertoire!  Thanks Home Chef!!

You can join Home Chef by following my affiliate link:

Home Chef

They are offering $30 off your first order right now!  Also, eBates is offering 10% cash back at Home Chef!  If you need to sign up for Ebates (and you NEED to sign up for Ebates.  Unless you don’t like money), you can do so here with my referral link:

Ebates

Happy Chef-ing

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put a Pin In It!

You Can Cook a Healthy, Fancy Meal with Home Chef

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