Critique: Michelina's Chicken Alfredo!

Nothing I could do would improve the pic

In general when I see a frozen entree on sale and for under a buck, I'm cautious. I wonder just how 'nutritious' such a meal-a-deal really could be. But, figuring, what the hey, I grabbed that one up along with another package that indicated I'd be enjoying 'beans and rice'. Yea.

The front of the package indicated that it was 'Delicious fettuccine pasta in a classic rich and creamy Alfredo sauce with chicken and broccoli'. My eyes were drawn to the word Alfredo which is synonymous with 'heart attack' for not a few nutritionists.

Seven grams of fat (3 grams saturated) were a bit of a culinary downer, even as the calorie content was a low 240 grams! Even the 660 grams of salt was not out of the ballpark, but 33 grams of carbohydrates was really over the top for a dieter like myself.

And, while it may not look like very much, the meal tasted OK. For .79 cents is was actually great. Just not a meal I'd serve to friends... unless I didn't like them.

Critique: Chicken Alfredo Florentine entree!

This frozen TV dinner style entree by the Michelina folks is one of their 'Lean Gourmet' meal a deals with pasta and chicken swimming bravely in a 'creamy Alfredo sauce' amongst bits of floating spinach.

Any dish with the moniker 'Alfredo' as part of the name is traditionally a pasta dish made from fettuccine pasta tossed with Parmesan cheese and butter, which all sounds pretty good, right? So, it was with no small amount of eagerness that I took this entree out of my freezer and inspected the microwave preparation instructions. They were pretty basic; just lift up a corner to vent, nuke on high for three minutes, then remove and stir the contents. Finally, cover it again (harder to do than it sounds by the way) and heat for an additional 1 to 1 ½ minutes! Easy greasy for a 260 calorie part of a complete meal!

Here's a serving hint! Make sure that you scoop out the contents and place them on a plate with some other more interesting sides; say like green beans and toast, for instance. (This will go a long way to diverting your attention from something that looks a lot like vomit).

Ding! The meal is ready!

So, here is what everything looked like when it came serving time. The sides really do help to make it more appealing and it still came in at just a tad over 500 calories! I felt that the initial nutritional information for the entree was augmented in a more positive direction by the green beans and toast. Other than the sky high sodium content, this meal wasn't all that bad – (just as long as you

can purchase it on sale like it did)! I gave the entree, itself, a score of 7 while the add-ons pushed up the overall experience to a solid 8!

The bottom line...

Meals like this one from Michelina are pretty much a dime a dozen. They are the frozen counterpart to some of the fast foods that will also kill you over time, if you make them part of your regular diet. Still, what with food prices for fresh produce, fruits and meat going through the roof under the Obama Administration, many of us have little, if any, choice.

Critique: Michelina's Sesame Chicken

I would have guessed that any food description with the word sesame in it would be OK. After all, sesame seed plants are one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world! Why, I often eat hamburger with buns that have sesame seeds sprinkled over them (why this is even done is a subject for another post). So, I figured since this meal-deal was also on sale, I’d give it a go.

This Lean Gourmet offering comes in at a meager 260 calories and even the sodium, at 600 milligrams, ain’t all that bad. But…it’s also an Asian dish – something I missed when I pick it up at the store. It’s not that I don’t like all things Asian; let’s just say that I’m more a meat and taters kind of guy. Still, it was on sale and so into the microwave it went.

This brings me to a problem I have with this line of meals from Michelina. Most of these packages instruct one to ‘tear a corner to vent’ which is OK. What’s not OK is that the instructions are on the bottom of the package. So, if there’s more than one operation to perform in the prep cycle (and there is), you have to carefully hold the whole affair up over your head to see what the next step entails. Most times, they want you to open up the package and stir this or that before re-nuking for another minute or more. Problem is, that lid like to curl up and so is really difficult to place back over the contents! I’m forced to place some kind of plastic utensil over the lid to hold it down! Michelina – This was not a well thought out process and you need to come up with something else.

After working through the intricacies of meal preparation, I sat down to eat. Right off, I noticed that the pasta was not al dente, but rather al soggy. Also, there was the issue with actually finding any chicken. I did spy what appeared to be some meat cubes, but they were too small to readily identify ad coming from a bird. Lastly, I found the taste to be mildly objectionable. Asian is just not my cup of tea and even though I ate the whole meal, it’s not some road I plan to travel again in the near future! This one gets a 5 on a scale of 10. Another in my growing list of entrees I plan to serve to guests I don’t particularly like.