I talked last week about how I’ve been struggling to be creative with meals recently. I’m typically a creature of habit, and when I find a meal that I like, I can eat in for days in a row without getting bored of it. But right now, because there’s so much sameness and repetition, I’ve been craving something a little different from my food.

I’ve dabbled with meal subscriptions in the past, but either I didn’t love the options they had for dishes, or it just wasn’t the right time… when I wasn’t getting home until 7 or 7:30 at night, I didn’t want to have to wait another 40 minutes before dinner was ready. But now that I am home ALL of the time, I have a lot more flexibility in my dinner prep timing. And since I was getting tired of searching the Internet for new recipe ides, I decided that this was the perfect time to give a meal subscription another try.

I decided to go with Home Chef, mostly because it was one of the ones that I hadn’t tried yet, and because I saw it on Carly’s Instagram and it looked good. I’ve been using it for over three months now, and I have no plans to stop anytime soon.

There are a few reasons that I’m really loving Home Chef. The first, and most important, is the recipe variety! There are so, so many options. They have different tiers of recipes, too – each week has options from the “Culinary Collection” (which is the “fanciest”), “Meal Kit” (which is the standard option), “15 Minute Meal Kit (which is… self-explanatory), and “Easy Prep Meal Kit” (which is even faster prep than the 15 minute option). You can also read each recipe while you’re selecting your meals so you know the skill level, how many steps the recipe has, and anything else you might be wondering. Home Chef does a really great job in balancing new recipes while bringing back old favorites, too.

My second favorite part is the customization options! If a dish calls for beef but you’re not really a red meat person, you can choose to substitute it for chicken. They also offer vegetarian, non-meat substitution options, too. The ability to customize has really been key for me – rather than having to skip a meal, I can just customize it instead.

The ease of choosing meals each week, and skipping weeks that you don’t want, is another major plus. I love going on and looking through each of the menu options… sometimes I’ll go through and plan for the next month all at once! There’s absolutely no hassle when you decide you want to skip a week, either – just click a button and you’re done. They even give you the option to donate those skipped meals to Feeding America, which is really important right now when we know so many people are food insecure.

There are other things that I haven’t personally tried but seem like a great idea – you can order extra “protein boxes” of chicken, beef, fish, etc. to supplement the meals that you’ve chosen for that week. I didn’t order during holiday weeks, but they did offer special holiday, family-style dishes. I’m not someone who pays close attention to nutritional labels all the time, but if you are, Home Chef has the breakdown for each meal on their recipe cards. And if you want to keep and collect your recipe cards to re-create your favorite dishes later, the cards come hole-punched so you can easily create a nice, organized recipe binder.

I’m pretty sure that my Home Chef use is something that will stay in my life post-pandemic – I just may start to take more advantage of the easy prep options and less of the culinary collections.

If you want to try Home Chef, use this link or referral code HEATHERT074. And don’t forget to let me know what you think if you do try it!!