Elderly and Senior Meal Delivery Solutions from the Experiences of Family Caretakers for New Family Caretakers
Personal Chef To Go
Personal Chef To Go Review of their Senior Meals and Prepared Meal Delivery Service
About Personal Chef To Go Prepared Meals
Personal Chef To Go (PCTG) may be the only senior meal service we recommend for automatic prepared meal deliveries. As the name suggests, family caretakers will find using this company is just like having a personal chef cook for your loved ones, and at a very reasonable price for what you get.
- Choose from 12 different gourmet meals from their menu which changes weekly.
- Buy fully prepared meals in increments of 5, 8, and 10 meals per week at $78, $118, and $138 per week.
- Average meal costs range between $15.60, $14.75, and $13.80
- Free Shipping is available for the eastern U.S.
You can pause your automatic food deliveries up to three weeks. To stop all deliveries you have to call the company. If you pause your deliveries and forget, PCTG will automatically send you an order based on their menu choices. We would love an a la carte ordering option! Your senior meals will arrive overnight, usually on a Friday, and are shipped fresh. We have had rare tray leaking issues with shipping many years ago, but now the process is iron-clad. In fact, we couldn't imagine a better way to do it. Shipping boxes are probably light enough for most seniors and elderly to carry into the house.
We use this service to send our Mom five meals a week, which she will generally use as dinners. She has also been known to use them for lunch, and even breakfast for that matter, when the menu is populated with her favorite food. Her meals do not take up much space in her refrigerator, and they last about a week, but Mom never lets that happen. Reheating these meals takes between two and three minutes. Since the food arrives fresh, all the meal components reheat to perfection.
The portion sizes are above average, and the menu is healthy enough to support her diabetic lifestyle, but we have to add our own green vegetables to most of these meals. We would also prefer a menu choice larger than twelve meals, but our Mom is not a picky eater, and we are always able to satisfy her. There will always be selections that include beef, seafood, chicken, and pork.
Nobody is Perfect
- There is no 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
- Sometime it can be hard to choose from the limited selection of meals, especially if that week a salad counts as two or three of the choices. We won't pay $15 for salad.
- Most of the meals you will get are not complete balanced meals. They will either be missing a green vegetable or a carb side dish. This can be especially important if your loved one is on a nutritional diet where green vegetables are important aspect of meal planning.
- Say you are able to select enough meals from the limited selection. You may find yourself getting doubles because one went out of inventory. The company reserves the right to make substitutions, which you have to pay for.
- Some of the entrees, sides, and vegetables we could identify from pictures of previous reviews of other services, as being outsourced and not cooked by the company's personal chefs at all.
Our Personal Chef To Go Reviews
We use PCTG to supplement our Mom's senior meal deliveries with Home Bistro and Top Chef Meals. Of course, we cook meals ourselves too, but as remote family caretakers, we find the service especially helpful when our busy lifestyle doesn't support frequent trips out to Mom's.
In our Silver Cuisine review, for example, we mentioned we felt the company's food pictures look much better than how their tasted. In the case of Personal Chef To Go, we found the opposite to be true.
We felt the images they use on the menu of their website do not come close to creating an appetizing representation of the food they provide. We can't tell you how many times we didn't select a meal because the picture did not look appealing, but then went back and ordered it anyway, and found the food to be excellent. Based on our experience, you can trust the description more than you can trust the picture. Here are some detailed Personal Chef To Go reviews from our most recent orders.
Personal Chef To Go Meals We Would Order Again
Crab Cakes with Broccoli and Sweet Red Peppers - $15
This is the only meal delivery service we know of that uses real lump crab meat instead of the much cheaper, crab meat substitute. Obviously, the price of crab meat is the issue, but at $15 a meal, PCTG doesn't just give you one, they give you two! They are perfectly cooked with a slight crunch on the outside and a creamy filling of just lump crab meat with traditional seasoning inside. Maryland would be proud of this effort.
Tuscan Style Stuffed Chicken Breast with Rice Pilaf - $15
These chicken breasts are stuffed with spinach, red peppers, mozzarella, and a hint of finely chopped walnuts. The portion size is larger than what you are likely to receive from other suppliers too.The fluffy clouds of Orzo complement the chicken perfectly, and both reheat perfectly in about two minutes.
Mongolian Pork Stir-Fry - $15
Everything about the pork is nothing short of divine. The pork tastes like it is marinated with the sauce, and the vegetables give a nice texture boost. The rice was perfect too, a challenge of any meal delivery service, especially if they freeze the food before it gets to you. We would have like to see a little more green vegetables to make it a balanced meal, but it was still an excellent value at $15.
Oven-Roasted Beef Loin with Garlic Mashed Sweet Potatoes - $15
This is not a Filet Mignon, but a beef shoulder. Even so, we would bet more than 75% of the general public wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The meat is tender and the matching Sherry Reduction Sauce with Mushrooms is the perfect compliment.
The Roasted Sweet Potatoes are equally good, and once again, we would have liked to see a green vegetable side to create a balanced meal.
Roasted Turkey with Homestyle Gravy - $15
We gave this meal a thumbs up because the turkey is real sliced turkey off a breast, but the flavorless cranberries and the watery gravy could easily go in the dumpster. The sweet potatoes were excellent, but the home-style gravy was watered down so bad, it wouldn't qualify as an Au Jus. Once again we are missing a green vegetable side to make this a complete balanced meal. Personal Chef To Go, adding a $1 worth of string beans won't kill you to make a balanced meal.
Personal Chef To Go Meals We Would Not Reorder
Healthy Baked Chicken Parmesan - $15
By "Healthy" PCTG means the chicken breast is seared without a breaded crust (although the name says baked). The chicken is tremendous and makes for a very generous portion size, but it's a chicken breast with sauce on it. You can see in the picture the Mozzarella portion fell well short of how one might visualize a Parmesan. We would have preferred a few extra calories for a properly prepared Chicken Parmesan. The penne was fine, the sauce was good, and again, a green vegetable side to make for a balanced meal would have been nice. We did not think this meal was a good value for $15.
Pesto Shrimp - $15
We have to say, the shrimp are very good and reheat perfectly. The sauce they come in tastes more like a buttery scampi then a pesto, We didn't understand how baby carrots (also on the outsourced menu) fit into the meal flavor profile, and then we finally figured it out. It doesn't. It's like serving sardines with eggs. Orzo or pasta would have been more traditional. Again, no green vegetable to make this a complete and balanced meal.
Roasted Chicken Breast in Sweet Marsala Sauce - $15
The chicken breast was good, but once again the sauce was watery and flavorless. We love to see a company use real mushrooms instead of canned. Here is another meal that does not come with a third side dish to make a balanced meal. For us, it didn't seem like this meal was worth $15.
Philly Cheesesteak Pasta
You might look at this picture and think the Philly Cheesesteak Pasta looks a lot like the cheap Chicken Marsala meal we reviewed above. And you would be right! Some companies will make substitutions to your orders if they run out of inventory. In this case, it seems absurd because the online orders, for the most part, are taken in advance. Instead of a beef meal, we get another chicken dish, missing a side, that we didn't think was worth $15. That is just poor kitchen management that translates to "We don't care about our customers." Imagine a company did that to you in a restaurant, you can send it back. Here you can't.
Shared Experiences from Other Family Caregivers
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Submitted Reviews and Comments
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Your Personal Chef To Go Review
Our reviews are written only
from the viewpoint of a family caretaker who has the responsibility of feeding one or two senior or elderly loved ones. We take into consideration shipping, packaging, storage, reheating, food quality, and price per meal to determine if the meal delivery service is a good value, convenience, and an option to support their family caretaking responsibilities. Advertisers do not influence our reviews.
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