August 2016 Home Chef Review + Coupon

Home Chef is a monthly meal subscription service that sends weekly meal subscription boxes of fresh, perfectly portioned ingredients that have everything you need to prepare home-cooked meals in your own kitchen. Home Chef meals can be cooked up in about 30 minutes. With today’s Home Chef Review, we’re reviewing our August 2016 Home Chef meal box.

Each week, you can choose the meals you would like to receive from Home Chef’s weekly menu. There are a variety of meals to choose from including breakfast, seafood, and vegetarian options. The week of your delivery, your Home Chef box is shipped to your doorstep. The ingredients are kept cool with packaging and ice packs.

Each Home Chef meal box includes colorful recipe cards for each of your weekly meals. The cards have a big picture of the final dish and the recipe on the front. The back of the cards have step by step prep and cook instructions and pictures. The recipe cards have 3 holes so you can add them to the Home Chef binder you receive in your first box.

Here’s a first look inside our August Home Chef box.

Inside Our August 2016 Home Chef Box

Our week 4 August 2016 Home Chef box contained ingredients and recipes for:

Venezuelan Asado Negro with Roasted Vegetables and Tostones
Classic Chicken Parmesan with Spaghetti and Garlic Bread
Breakfast Egg Boats with Bacon and Candied Grapefruit
Chocolate Cherry Smoothie with Vanilla Almond Milk

Cooking with Home Chef

The first meal we cooked was the Breakfast Egg Boats with Bacon and Candied Grapefruit. Home Chef provided the recipe and ingredients to cook up this tasty breakfast.

The recipe cards include instructions for preparing the meals, including the prep work. For this breakfast, we chopped up the green onions, split the grapefruit, cut the bacon, and hollowed out the bread.

Next, we mixed up the eggs, bacon, cheese, and green onions. We made sure to keep some of the bacon and green onions set aside for topping, as Home Chef instructed.

Then it was time to fill up the bread “boats.” Again, the Home Chef recipe card provides helpful tips to make sure you don’t overfill your boats.

After about 25 minutes in the oven, it was time to enjoy this savory breakfast. The Breakfast Bread Boats were a hearty and delicious meal. The blend of egg, cheese and green onion provided great flavor to accompany the bacon. Home Chef was generous with the bacon, which was awesome. You can eat it straight out of the oven or slice it up. The candied grapefruit was a sweet and tart side to the meal.

For dinner, we prepared Home Chef’s Chicken Parmesan. This is a family favorite dish and we were curious to see how the Home Chef version measured up to what we enjoy in a restaurant.

The recipe walked us through the prep, cooking the pasta, prepping the garlic bread, and setting up the breading station.

While the chicken baked, we topped it with marinara and mozzarella sauce. The resulting dish was restaurant quality. The chicken was moist, the breading was crispy, and the garlic bread had just the right amount of garlic and cheese.

Home Chef recently added smoothies and fruit to their weekly menu. This week we tried their Chocolate Cherry Smoothies. To prepare the smoothie, we just needed to throw all of the ingredients Home Chef provided into a blender.

After blending, we topped the smoothie with the provided chocolate syrup. It was such a healthy and refreshing treat! You can’t go wrong with chocolate and cherries. The vanilla almond milk and Greek yogurt gave this smoothie a great creamy texture. We’ll definitely be making this smoothie on our own!

The last Home Chef dinner we made was the Venezuealan Asado Negro. There were a few more cooking steps to prepare this dish – the prep and cooking time was about 40 minutes. This was also the first time we cooked with plantains so we were excited to make our first tostones.

The final dish was so flavorful and savory. The steak was juicy and tender. The roasted radishes and cucumbers, and the tostones, were great sides for the dish. We used the sides to help soak up all the saucy goodness.

Once again, Home Chef delivered some delicious meals that were easy to cook and provided gourmet meals that we enjoyed immensely. We love that Home Chef offers a wide variety of meal options – from breakfast to dinners, as well as the addition of their smoothie and fruit add-ons. All of the vegetables were fresh and crisp. The meat portions are generous which is great if you have a hearty eater in the family. With Home Chef, we’re able to try different recipes to cook dinners we might not have tried otherwise.

Which was your favorite August 2016 Home Chef meal?