Healthy Choice Frozen Entrées

Typically my go to brand of frozen entrées is Marie Calendar’s. The food tastes pretty good, and they are not too expensive if you find them on sale. Albertsons seem to have them permanently on sale at $10 for three entrées. When I was at the market Saturday night, I picked up a couple of their café steamers entrees. The gimmick is that there is an outside bowl with sauce, and an inner bowl/basket with the food items. You heat the whole think up in a microwave, then combine the two parts in the bowl and eat. Once again, the photo on the box looks better than what comes out of the box.

Left is the “steam” basket that contains the chicken, vegetables, and rice. Middle is the sauce and sesame seeds in the outer bowl. Right is everything mixed together in the bowl.

First, it look like the entrée contained more food than reality. I can count 8-9 pieces of chicken in the box photo, and if you extrapolate the left 1/3 of the bowl, you would think there was probably a dozen large pieces of chicken. If you look at the left picture above, there was maybe 5-6 decent sized pieces of chicken, plus a few small pieces. Taste wise, it was so-so. Their own website shows a review score of 3.5★; I would have given it 3.0★: 2.5 for the food, and 0.5 for the “healthy” ingredients. The taste is typical for frozen meals, especially the weird carrot smell, but also bland since it only has half the sodium compared to other brands. The entrées from Marie Calendar’s are definitely tastier (relatively), but now too healthy for you, especially the salt content. “Healthy” probably just means lower fat and salt.

Hmm, they’re both kinda unhealthy, but convenient. The Health Choice entrée has a lot less sodium, saturated fat, calcium, and potassium (probably due to the mashed potatoes), but has more carbs and sugars. Ironically, the Marie Calendar’s entrée only received a 2.6★ on their own website. I guess it is a tie, and I should eat as few of these as I can.