While we do love that Healthy Choice works so hard to pack flavor into such low-calorie meals, we tend to have mixed feelings about their frozen food. For example, we loved the Portabella Spinach Parmesan, but we found the Sweet Sesame Chicken to be a bit of a disappointment and we thought the Shiitake Chicken Power Bowl was more interesting than tasty.
So we were a little nervous going into the Healthy Choice Chicken Feta & Farro Power Bowl. This is a meal that had the potential to go either way.
Now, when we pulled this out of the microwave, it was entirely inedible. While that sounds like an exaggeration, it’s actually not. Everything was packed into one corner and dry as a bone. The chicken was dehydrated to the point of being too hard and rubbery to even eat. The farro was like densely packed gravel.
We thought to ourselves that this had to be a factory defect. Healthy Choice couldn’t possibly have intentionally released something this awful, right? After combing through customer reviews on the Healthy Choice website, we could not find anyone who seemed to be having this issue, which confirmed our suspicions.
So we ran out to our local Target store and got a second Chicken Feta & Farro Power Bowl. And wow, we’re not sure what went wrong with that first bowl, because our second one was actually pretty good.
Now, you’ll notice from the picture below that the chicken bits are a bit whiter than you might expect. They’re not bad, though we’ve certainly had better chicken in a frozen meal before. They don’t have a lot of flavor, and the texture is really inconsistent — some pieces will be juicy and succulent, while others will be harsh and gristly.
The addition of chickpeas is quite welcome here, as they add some much-needed mediterranean flair. And we say it’s much-needed because the feta cheese, which is a part of this meal’s title, is barely discernible. We don’t think there’s more than the faintest sprinkling of the stuff here.
We would have never guessed this from our first attempt, but this is actually a very soggy meal, loaded up with juicy tomatoes and with hints of chardonnay wine and lemon juice (from concentrate). It’s a good consistency here, and we definitely prefer this to the bone-dry mess we ended up with during our first attempt.
We’re iffy on the farro. Even though this is a time-tested grain that humans have been consuming for thousands of years, we think a nice quinoa or even a barley would have been a better choice. It’s not bad; it’s just not as good as it could have been.
As far as calories go, this is a middle-of-the-road meal. While 310 calories is pretty low for your average frozen meal, Healthy Choice meals quite often clock in at less than 300. This also contains 600 mg of sodium, which is lower than many frozen meals, but is still a bit higher than we’d like it to be.
The Healthy Choice Chicken Feta & Farro Power Bowl is good but not great. We’d actually be a bit nervous about trying this again due to the horror of our first attempt. But if you end up with something more like our second attempt, there’s a lot to like here.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Healthy Choice Power Bowl, check out our package scans below.
