Today’s lunch was a Healthy Choice Café Steamer; this one
was the “Top Chef Season 10 Challenge Winner” Crust less Chicken Pot Pie. I like the concepts behind the line because
the flavors and textures are generally left more intact than with traditional
Nuke foods. This one promises chicken
tenderloins with carrots, corn, peas and dumplings in a pot pie sauce, and when
I put it together that’s pretty much what it looks like. I think they choose soup, stew looking meals
to hide the fact that at the end of the day it’s really a gelatinous mass.
Where to begin with the fail pile? Well, I think putting out a positive note the
vegetables were fresh tasting and reasonably crisp… until you look at the
ratio. There are far too many carrots
and an overwhelming amount of corn. Corn
being nothing more than a fattening agent, it always irritates me when I open
one of these and it’s a huge bowl of corn with little else for any real
nutrition.
The sauce is a thick, chicken stock based cream sauce, nothing
too spectacular in its creation really.
Looking at the ingredients, the words cornstarch and flavoring are all
over it. I think this explains why it
seemed so condensed.
The chicken was moist enough, but seemed void of any real
seasoning unless dredged through the goop.
On its own the texture fell apart nicely, which is a nice change from
typical dry chicken one gets out of the microwave however with all the changes
in microwaved food containers you only really get dry chicken from overheating
leftovers.
The most disappointing of all was the dumplings, large
white mounds of dough that seemed to overcook in the steam basket and therefore
be unable to soak up any broth. Biting
into one of the deceptive looking dumplings yielded something more foul than
how they looked. How they tasted… Globs of paste like dough coated my mouth in a
disappointing array of yuck…
“At least I’m eating healthy” I thought as I chomped into
another bite of food glue. Wrong! Not only is this thing backed with filler and
artificial ingredients its 300 cal of cornstarch and salt. Sure there are 20 grams of protein but the 40
grams of carbs are so not worth it. And what’s
worse is the intense stomach cramping that followed a short time later. I think if I were to do this again, it would
be to serve a large bowl to someone I truly believed to be full of shit. Blah!
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