Healthy Choice Gourmet Steamers — Sweet Sesame Chicken

Overview: I like it when people ask what I had for dinner and I can tell them “sweet sesame chicken with rice, vegetables, and sweet and spicy sesame sauce.” Of course, if they know me they immediately say “that sounds like a prepared meal.”

Label: A healthy choice indeed! And for once the label gives you the all the nutritional facts up front with no need to do complicated calculations. Because really: it’s all in the bowl. You aren’t eating half of one of these. So here goes: 330 calories, 5 g of fat (no trans fat), and 330 g of sodium (only 14% of my daily recommended intake!). I could eat five or six of these things and still be coming in at numbers lower than a frozen pizza. Cancel my doctor’s appointment!

Review: Actually, it’s not hard for one of these individual meal packages to come in at a less-than-deadly nutritional rating. That’s because there’s really not very much to them.

The Gourmet Steamers give you slightly larger servings than the usual run of TV dinner, but just one of them isn’t going to fill you up. Even so, I very rarely eat more than one at a time so I get to feel healthy for a whole day.

This particular edition of the GS line is tasty and, as long as you’re not too hungry, satisfying. Though there’s no denying the unfortunate effect microwaving has on the texture of your food, and especially ingedients that are supposed to be a bit crispy, like the snow peas and carrots here. Once you mix it all together it’s just mush. The chicken pieces have the exact same mouth feel as everything else. But the spicy sesame sauce is nice and the different ingredients go well together.

Price: $2.99 on sale. A very good deal.

Score: 7.5 / 10