Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers: General Tso Chicken

By: Tanya Taylor, PhD | Aug 22, 2007

I totally love the concept for Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers line, with the sauce being in a separate bowl, which helps steams the other ingredients, while the meal being microwaved. But before I talk about the taste, let me mention that when this meal came out of the microwave, it looked absolutely fabulous - the picture on the box doesn't do it nearly enough justice. It seriously looked picture perfect with the rice dotted with different color vegetables, and the meat on one side, just looking like perfect pieces of tempura battered chicken. Kudos to the folks at Healthy Choice for not only coming up with this innovative concept, but making this meal look so great. I actually couldn't wait to dig in.

I poured everything in the bowl with the sauce, mixed it around a little and dug in. I took up a big forkful of veggie rice with sauce and I experienced nirvana. The sauce is sweet and has a little spicy kick at the end. Perfect and an improvement over the original HC General Tso Chicken, which had soggy rice. I could even taste the sweetness of the sweet peas - the taste of veggies are often lost on microwaving. I was all set to give this 5 stars for taste when I remembered that I hadn't even eaten any of the chicken yet. And therein lies my disappointment with HC.

HC, did you all forget to flavor the meat? I'm just going to assume that you guys were so busy making the sauce and the rice perfect that the meat kind of just slipped by, because it is tasteless - needs salt or some other flavor - or something! I suppose you might have meant for us to drench it in sauce so that we wouldn't realize how lackluster it is on it's own - and since my sauce was half finished, I couldn't. This definitely needs some improvement, and was a big letdown after enjoying the wonderful sauce and rice.

Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers General Tso Chicken has 430 calories, 9 grams of fat which is 14% of the daily required amount, of which there is only 1 gram of saturated fat and no trans fat, 25% of the daily sodium suggestion (600 mg), 17 grams of protein and 66 grams of total carbohydrates which includes 10 grams of sugars and 5 grams of total fiber. It's also 9 Weight Watchers Points.

This meal was $3.35. For 430 calories, I definitely want some improvement in the taste. If not for the chicken, this would be a 4.5 lips review, but I'm still testing out more varieties to find the one worthy of 5 kisses.

Rating

Taste:

Nutrition:

Price:

Overall:

See more on: Frozen Meals , chicken, frozen dinner   comments (7)