Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes Review

Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes

We haven’t had much luck with the Eating Well brand of frozen food. We were originally optimistic about these frozen meals, but our experiences actually eating the stuff have really worn that optimism down. Yet we keep sampling the stuff in hopes that we’ll stumble upon something great. And that’s what brings us to the Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes.

This meal has a much longer cook time than we expected. There are three sets of instructions based on the wattage of your microwave, and a 900-watt microwave requires a total of 9 minutes. Our 1100-watt microwave still required 7 whole minutes of cook time. Yeesh! And then, once all that is done, you’ll need to let it cool for several minutes — we definitely don’t recommend eating this right out of the microwave, as it will be extremely hot.

The Eating Well gimmick is that every meal is vacuum-sealed for freshness. Each box features a see-through window that allows you to see that food all sealed up inside, so you can imagine the freshest frozen meal you’ve ever eaten in your life. However, we don’t think it does anything for the actual freshness of the meal. As far as we can tell, it’s nothing more than a cheap gimmick.

In this particular meal, it’s the asparagus that benefits the most from this process. It’s really hard to get asparagus right in a frozen meal, but Eating Well has pulled it off here. This is soft with a nice crunch to it, which is exactly how cooked asparagus should be. Of course, this isn’t consistent, as some pieces are bound to be a bit too soggy. But when it works, it really works.

Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes

Unfortunately, the other veggies don’t do quite as well. The carrots are soggy, and a few of our carrot bits were actually burnt. The fingerling potatoes, which should be the star of this show, turn out kind of rubbery, and the skin just feels off to us. We love a good potato skin when it’s done well, but here the texture is off and the flavor is too much like dirt for our sensibilities.

The chicken is fine. It’s a bit watery, but there’s a nice peppery seasoning to it. We do suspect the seasoning (which is a combo of sea salt and “spices”) is really just there to hide the blandness of the chicken. But hey, it actually works.

The sauce is a combo of dijon mustard and chicken broth, yet it tastes oddly like Miracle Whip. It actually complements the chicken quite well, but it clashes with the veggies. It tastes especially weird with the potatoes. We think something a bit more creamy would have been a better choice here.

This is a very low-calorie meal, with only 260 calories (90 from fat). It’s also comparatively low in sodium, at 610 mg. We say comparatively because that’s actually a pretty hefty amount of sodium; it’s just that so many of the frozen meals we’ve seen contain more than that.

We’d love to report that the Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes is a great meal, but we can’t. The quality of the vegetables — even the asparagus — is way too inconsistent, and the sauce wasn’t a great choice. While we appreciate the low calorie count, we’re not sure it matters if you find yourself throwing half the meal out and cooking up something else. Our dear, sweet Freezer Meal Frenzy readers deserve better than this.

To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Eating Well frozen food, check out our package scans below.

Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes

Eating Well Chicken & Fingerling Potatoes

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