Eating Well’s line of frozen food pretty much always disappoints us, but we keep eating these meals in the hopes of finding something we can rave about. So we’re trying out the Spicy Asian Inspired Chicken while trying to maintain a positive disposition, because our readers deserve to know the details of these frozen meals.
The Eating Well gimmick is to vacuum-seal the ingredients and then leave a window on the front of the box so you can see all the lovely stuff inside. This rarely ever works out. In the case of the Spicy Asian Inspired Chicken, dear God, these noodles look like someone stuck a wet industrial mop head into the freezer. So much for our positive disposition.
We’ve also never noticed these meals to be any fresher tasting than a typical frozen meal, so the shrinkwrap gimmick really doesn’t seem to do anything at all. It’s more an aesthetic choice than a practical one, we guess. We have to admit that it looks kind of cool when you watch the shrinkwrap balloon out in the microwave like some kind of space food.
All things considered, this actually comes out of the microwave looking less smashed than we expected. It also smells really good.
The spicy sauce is actually very tasty, and pretty darn spicy. This isn’t the spiciest dish we’ve ever had, but it’s spicier than we’d expect a frozen meal to be. There were some runny noses around the Freezer Meal Frenzy office once we ate some of this.
And the chicken isn’t bad either. It’s maybe a little stale around the edges — which is a bit ironic coming from a company that trademarked the term Fresh-Seal — but the centers are soft and the flavor is halfway decent.
The noodles don’t look any better cooked than they do when they’re sealed into the package. In fact, they actually look worse. They kind of look like worms that drown in the rain and are left all pale and soggy on the sidewalk. The consistency is way off too. These somehow end up being soggy while also being firm. They kind of taste like old Chinese food you should have thrown out a few days ago.
This also comes with a heap of veggies. The water chestnuts are the worst we’ve ever had in a frozen food. Something just feels off about them. The baby corn tastes pretty great, but it’s a little too soggy around the outside. We’re pretty ambivalent about the edamame portion. We think it’s so-so, but we also think there’s way too much of it in this dish. There’s also some mustard greens, which really just stick to the edges rather than do anything for the meal, and bell peppers that are way too mushy.
So the sauce really is a life-saver here. Without it, we’d probably have thrown most of this meal out. With it, though, this becomes pretty edible. It’s definitely not the best Asian-inspired dish we’ve tried, but it’s not completely terrible.
As far as calories go, this meal is alright. It has 310 calories, but only 50 of those are from fat. The sodium levels are through the roof, though, at 910 mg. Watch out!
Eating Well’s Spicy Asian Inspired Chicken is a bummer of a dish that’s saved by a delicious sauce. While we certainly won’t be recommending this, we also didn’t hate eating it once just to try it. There are just way too many better meals out there to ever return to this.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition info or ingredients in this Asian-inspired frozen chicken dish, check out our package scans below.
