The Healthy Choice line of frozen foods is geared toward offering low-calorie frozen meals that are quick to make. The Power Bowls assortment takes this idea but keeps the protein and fiber levels pretty high. These are meant to satisfy hunger and provide ample amounts of protein an fiber while also keeping that calorie count low.
It’s not always easy to check all of those boxes with a single meal, but the Healthy Choice Shiitake Chicken Bowl does a reasonable job of it.
Unlike Healthy Choice’s steamers, this meal doesn’t have a special colander that keeps some of the ingredients elevated during the cooking process. That means you can simply toss this meal into the microwave and it’s ready to eat when you pull it out. No stirring required (though you’ll want to let it cool before you dig in).
We love mushrooms, so the shiitake mushrooms were the part of this meal we were the most excited to try. In this meal, those are thinly sliced but still packed with flavor. We really like them.
We’re less enthusiastic about the chicken portion. It’s a white meat chicken that seems a bit soggy on the outside and dry on the inside. The flavor is decent, but the texture and consistency are off.
The chicken and mushrooms come with a blend of veggies, including carrots, red bell peppers, edamame, bok choy, and kale. It’s quite a variety, and provides a wide assortment of flavors. We did find the edamame to be a little dry and the kale to have a strange aftertaste, but everything else worked really well for us.
We appreciate the red quinoa and black barley in addition to the red and brown rice. It makes for a multicolored, multi-flavored base for this meal rather than the blandness that a simple brown or white rice might provide. It really pays off here, as it keeps the whole meal interesting from top to bottom. There’s such a wide assortment of flavors here that it will keep your taste buds entertained until the very last bite.
And there’s a sprinkling of soy sauce to tie the whole meal together.
This meal contains 310 calories, which isn’t all that bad. It also provides 21g of protein. The sodium level is a little high, at 600 mg, but that’s actually quite a bit lower than the average frozen food. This also comes in a biodegradable serving tray made from plant-based fiber. The bowl gets a little soggy by the time you finish eating this meal, but we’ll gladly take it if that’s the cost of saving the planet.
The Healthy Choice Shiitake Chicken Bowl is not a boring meal by any means. The ingredients are so varied that they almost seem random, yet the whole thing works together in a way that’s quite impressive. It’s not the best-tasting healthy meal on the market, but it never ceases to be interesting. And if you’ve been eating a lot of diet foods recently, the mere un-blandness of this meal will definitely be a welcome respite from the world of muted flavors and overwhelming sense of blah.
To learn more about the nutrition or ingredients for this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
