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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.
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This is a review of the vegetarian plan (starting at $9.95 per serving) for two people, twice a week ($39.80 per week + shipping). Delivery is free with orders over $45. Shipping is $10 for orders less than $45.
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About Home Chef Vegetarian Meal Kit Subscription Box
The Subscription Box: Home Chef
The Cost: Meals start at $9.95 per serving, and delivery is free for orders over $40.
COUPON: Get $30 off your first box from Home Chef. No coupon required, just use this link.
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.)
Home Chef Vegetarian Menu April 2018 Review
When I first signed up for Home Chef, I took a short quiz about meal preferences and dietary restrictions. They asked me what I like to eat, as well as what I like to avoid. Based on my answers, Home Chef recommends recipes each week. As is the case with most meal kit services, you can also 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. For instance, there are only around 3 veggie meals each week. So the ability to customize things kind of disappears.
That said, there are usually about 10 items on the menu, total, and some “Add On” items like fruit or breakfast picks that you can choose to include in your box. (They’ve had some really tasty-looking smoothies available lately!)
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All of the ingredients you need arrive snugly inside insulating packaging made of cotton fiber. The fiber does go in the trash, but the idea is that it, unlike other materials, will eventually decompose. The plastic covering goes into the recycling.
Each meal’s ingredients are packaged in a handy zip-shut bag. Bigger items that might not fit in the bag arrive loose in the box. Inside those bags, most ingredients are pre-portioned and only individually wrapped as necessary to minimize waste.
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Home Chef Apple and Goat Cheese Flatbread with Candied Walnuts
Calories per Serving: 913
Prep and Cook Time, According to Home Chef: 35-45 minutes
Actual Time to Table: About 45 minutes
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
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I love apples in savory recipes. This dish is listed as “intermediate” but since it’s basically a pizza, I decided to trust in my burgeoning cooking skills and give it a shot.
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The most complicated step in this recipe is caramelizing the onions. Which is to say, it’s a really easy recipe, hehe. I do think my heat was a little high on the onions because they weren’t as evenly caramel-brown as I had expected them to get, but they still ended up being delicious. And the process is literally just letting thinly sliced onions cook down in a bit of oil. I had no idea caramelizing onions was that easy!
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The flatbreads come premade, though they do have you warm them up a little in the oven before you get started with assembling the toppings. They suggest this fan-like style of laying out the apple slices. I was surprised how fancy it ended up looking, though I think I used too many of my slices on this first pie. (The slices are kind of spaced out on the second one… it’s not quite as pretty, hehe!)
Before you wrap things up, you candy some walnuts. I didn’t grab a pic of that process because it went too quickly—I was all-hands-on-pan for the few minutes the walnuts were rolling around in the sugar water so that the sugar didn’t start to burn!
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Once the apples are all arranged atop their bed of mozzarella, you pop the flatbread in the oven for just a bit longer. Then you pile on the onions, some greens, crumbled goat cheese, and the walnuts. I thought this dish was suuuuper tasty! The combination of sweet and savory was awesome—I thought I’d just eat a small piece or two, but then I kept slicing off small bits to munch on (a lot like pie at holiday time, hehe). I think the walnut crunch is really smart here. The apples have a lot of juiciness, but after being in the oven, they’re more tender than crisp. The freshness of the greens and the bite of the walnuts makes the texture as interesting as the taste.
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Home Chef Tomato Risotto with Mozzarella Kale and Pine Nuts
Calories per Serving: 754
Prep and Cook Time, According to Home Chef: 35-45 minutes
Actual Time to Table: About 55 minutes
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
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I’m getting good at making risotto. It shows up in a lot of vegetarian subscription boxes. (Remember the recipe from last month’s box?) It’s shockingly easy to make, given the flavorful, dreamy result. But I will say, it takes. So. Long. If you’re the type to come home after work famished and wanting a recipe that’s ready ASAP, this isn’t it. I mean, it probably tastes even more awesome after you’ve been waiting for it to finish, but standing there stirring while your mouth waters away… Whew. It is rough!
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It was tricky to get a good picture of the risotto mid-cooking, just because of all the steam, but squint through the fog here and admire the tomato-y goodness brewing in this pot! The kitchen smelled like grandma’s house while this yummy rice dish was cooking up. I thought it was interesting that you add a bit of tomato paste and chopped tomatoes to the pot before you start to spoon water in—I was a little worried it would burn, but the heat ended up bringing out the flavors and prepping them to infuse into every bite of rice. It took me about a half hour to cook the rice thoroughly. It’s a long time to wait, so I recommend popping on a podcast while you work!
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I’ve mentioned before how a lot of these recipes end up being pretty carb heavy. I’m happy that this risotto came with a big bunch of kale to pair it with. It makes the meal more filling and curbs that “time for bed!” feeling that comes over me after chowing down on a ton of starchy food!
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It’s hard to fault a dish that requires you to stir in a bunch of parmesan and two pats of butter at the end, hehe. This dish is kind of the grown-up version of cheesy Spaghetti-Os. The tomato flavor was rich and yummy and the kale, peppered with pine nuts and a few bits of mozzarella helped shake up the texture. I will say that while this recipe takes a long long time to cook, it stays in the fridge and reheats beautifully (minus the kale). Hello leftovers!
The Verdict: I really liked both of these recipes! They weren’t the most convenient recipes, in that they took awhile to cook, but they’re definitely recipes I’d make again, probably for a special dinner or a night where I’m having friends over. (I have a scheme to try making the flatbreads appetizer-sized, maybe by using English muffins or mini pitas in lieu of the big naan-style flatbread.) $10.00 is a little pricey for each dish, though it’s probably on par with what I’d pay for either of these dishes at a restaurant. I think if you can afford it, the convenience factor is nice (getting all of the ingredients you need, no wasted food, no need to worry about what to make for dinner). I do think I can recreate these recipes for a little bit less at the local grocery store (though I might end up with more ingredients than I need for the single recipe, so I’ll have to find other things to cook with those ingredients).
To Wrap Up:
Can you still get this box if you sign up today? Each week, Home Chef introduces new recipes to choose from, though there are favorite dishes that repeat now and then.
Coupon: Get $30 off your first box from Home Chef. No coupon required, just use this link.
Value Breakdown: Price-wise, Home Chef meals start at $9.95 per serving, which is cheaper than Plated ($12 per serving) and on par with Blue Apron ($9.99 per serving) and Hello Fresh ($9.99 per serving).
Check out all of our Home Chef reviews and find other meal boxes in the Meal Subscription Box Directory!
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Would you want to try either of these Home Chef recipes? And if you have tried them, what did you think?