Our Family HomeChef Review: With Kids!

We do the best we can to keep our schedule sane and simple, so we have plenty of free time for our sporadic and random travel, but sometimes our schedule fills up beyond our control. When I see a busy schedule coming on our calendar, I do the best I can to have a plan of attack to help me stay sane! Do you do this too?

Last week, our schedule was just that. Full of good things but busy to the brim. I knew if I wanted to feed my family healthy meals consistently, I’d need to either have a bunch of freezer meals ready or do something like try a meal kit service. When I saw the HomeChef special to get $90 off your meal order, it sealed the deal. (Just some quick math here, but it ended up costing us $24.50 for three meals—or $1.63 per serving! More on that later.)

Why did we choose a meal kit delivery service like HomeChef? Mostly because we love it (we tried HelloFresh a few years ago)! My 10-year-old is actually the one who loves to make them. But here are a few other reasons:

I love to cook with my kids, and they love it too!
Our busy schedule—this saved me time from planning, food prep and shopping.
We could pick and choose the meals we thought we’d like best.
We love variety in our menu and simplicity, but left to my own meal planning, I don’t seem to always find the best variety.
The price was right!

What is HomeChef?

HomeChef is a meal kit and food delivery service, that sends you pre-portioned ingredients. If you’ve never heard of them before, you might be wondering about their reliability. I was surprised to learn that they are a very well-established company, with over 800 employees and shipping over 3 million meals per month!

What kind of meals are included in HomeChef?

Like most meal kit companies, HomeChef offers a wide range of options including carb conscious, calories conscious, and vegetarian. As I was browsing the meal choices I saw salads, international cuisine, pasta dishes, chicken, seafood, steak, simple meals like pork tenderloin, and unique meals like chicken taco stuffed peppers.

The only thing I was really disappointed about was that the one meal I really wanted to try, orange chicken, was not available on the week I was ordering! Oh well. (We actually ended up being VERY pleased with our meals!)

How did we pick our meals?

As I considered the various meal choices, I first considered what types of food we ALL liked. Next, I considered which meals included ingredients that I already had in my stockpile (this was so I could stretch the meals—read on to see how well this worked out!)

I DID NOT consider the amount of time it took for the meals (mostly because I wasn’t interested in the 5 minute meals, even though that would have been nice.) I also DID NOT consider the level of difficulty (mostly because that didn’t really intimidate us, we love the kitchen).

We ended up choosing these three meals for our week:

BBQ Beef Enchiladas with Corn Salsa
Steak Strip Gnocchi Carbonara with Bacon and Peas
Pineapple Pepper Jelly Pork Chops with Bok Choy and Bell Peppers

Making HomeChef Meal Kits with Kids

My 10-year-old begged to do all the meals. He had prepared one of our meals from HelloFresh a few years ago, and really enjoyed it, so it was fun to see his excitement with this kit now too.

Why do we let our kids prepare the meals?

Super-simple instructions with photos make it very easy to follow directions and achieve excellent results.
It grows their confidence as they try new things and learn they are capable of a lot in the kitchen.
They learn how to present the food in a beautiful way, by matching it to the picture as best as they can.
It helps them to be willing to try new flavors, cooking styles and recipes. Since they made it themselves and will then reap the benefits of the hard work.

All said and done, there really wasn’t much he couldn’t do for each of these recipes. He did admit it wasn’t very easy for him to roll some of the enchiladas (you can see that on my Instagram stories this week!)

He gave the meals a two-thumbs up in regards to making them and tasting them! 🙂

Stretching Meals

Shhh, this is my secret. I’m not sure if HomeChef would like it if I told you this, but seriously, listen up here, because I even surprised myself.

I knew I would want to tell my readers about HomeChef, so when I ordered my box, I really wanted to make sure it was very budget-friendly since you all love my frugal finds so much!

That’s the main reason I decided to order the cheapest option of meals, which was 3 meals, each being only 2 servings each. (We have a family of 5, so I was a little nervous about this, but went on faith that I’d be able to add a few extra ingredients and stretch it to feed all of us without a problem.)

This brought my total to only $24.50. Doing the math, that’s a total of $8.16 per meal. Assuming I’d get that to feed all five of us, I calculated a cost of $1.63 per serving!!

Despite my nervousness, I’m happy to report VERY GOOD news!!!

Every meal, except for one, stretched to feed all five of us, even better than I anticipated. Here’s how we did it:

Enchiladas. The kit came with 6 small tortillas. I thought it wouldn’t be enough so I added 2 extra tortillas from some that I had in the fridge. I also added about 1/4 pound extra ground beef (more left overs from another meal). That’s all I added, and it was plenty. We had our fill! (Although we did all want more because it was SO delicious!)
Steak/Gnocchi. I did not add any steak, but I could have easily added a few strips from the Steak-Ums box I had in the freezer. I did make a side dish of macaroni, but we hardly needed. The gnocchi went over much better with the kids than I expected!
Porkchops. This was the meal that did not stretch really at all. I could have easily added some extra pork chops as I was making it, and some extra pineapple to the sauce to make it feed all of us, but I decided not too. Mostly my husband and I ate the vegetables, and I served the left over macaroni from the night before to compliment the pork chops for the kids.

Again, I can’t tell you how much in shock we all were that these meals stretched as well as they did. I really only added two tortillas and a very small amount of ground beef, and that was it!!!

Here are my tips for looking for meals that will stretch well. Look for meals that include . . .

rice as a side. It’s super easy to make some extra rice.
common ingredients that you keep in your fridge anyway, maybe as snacks—like apples, carrots, green beans, salad.
meats that you keep stocked in your freezer. For instance, if I see pork chops, chicken or ground beef on sale, I grab them and then I have them in my deep freeze ready for whenever I need them.
items in your pantry, like beans or pasta.

>> Get your first box for $19.80! To do what we did, order the 3 meal option, with 2 servings each, and use my tricks to stretch the meals!

Are meal kits worth the money?

You are definitely paying for convenience, no matter what. But remember to calculate how much time its saving you from meal planning, grocery shopping, and even food prep as many of the items come already chopped!

If you’re willing to use some secrets, like adding a few extra ingredients to stretch the meals, I think you’ll find that your dollar goes a long way.

Also take into consideration what your family loves to do. Maybe you enjoy spending time in the kitchen, and bonding together through 30 minutes of meal prep would work really well for you. How much is that together time worth to you? (I feel like we need to add a little MasterCard insert here—do you remember those “it’s priceless” commercials?)

How can I get HomeChef for cheap?

Use this special link to save $90 off HomeChef meals.
Add extra ingredients into your meals, so they stretch.
Plan simple, cheap meals on the extra days.
Refer friends. After your first order you can get $35 credit for every friend you refer (they’ll get $35 off too!)
Stop eating out and use that money for the meal kit.

>> Get 2 meals for just $19.80 <<

What are some other meal kit services?

Here are some other meal kit meal services that you might want to consider. We’ve tried several of them. They are all a little different and unique as to how they do things and the meals they offer. I’d actually recommend trying a few before deciding on one that works for you, if you want to use a meal kit service regularly.

HelloFresh – Get $40 off your first box!
Blue Apron – Save $80 on first four boxes!
Sun Basket – $35 off first order and $10 off second!
Fresh Meal Plan – $20 off your first two orders
HomeChef – $35 off your first order

If you’d rather buy your own ingredients, but love the idea of having a variety of meals in your meal plan, consider these cheaper meal planning options: