Healthy Choice is full of good ideas when it comes to low-calorie frozen food. For example, their Crustless Chicken Pot Pie removes the crust from a traditional pot pie to reduce the calorie count, and their Chicken Linguini with Red Pepper Alfredo Sauce replaces the alfredo, which is usually packed with calories, with a tasty red pepper sauce.
The Honey Balsamic Chicken takes a similar approach, creating something similar to a rice-less stir fry dish, or perhaps a cooked chicken salad. Of course, this time the result is a low-calorie meal that tastes like a low-calorie meal. That’s maybe not a bad thing for everyone, but we wanted a little more from this dish.
But before we talk about any of that, we want to point out that, like so many of Healthy Choice’s other frozen meals, this one comes with its main ingredients in a colander so they stay nestled above the sauce while the meal is in the microwave. When the timer dings, you must pull it out of the microwave, dump the contents of the colander into the sauce bowl beneath it, and stir.
This isn’t the best choice for every meal, but we think it works just fine here. The sauce is intended to cover everything evenly when you stir it. That means it takes a good deal of stirring to make sure everything is in it’s place, but we don’t have a problem with that. Good meals are worth a little effort, after all.
What is a problem, however, is that not every ingredient feels like a good choice with this particular honey balsamic glaze.
The chicken is fine. In fact, that’s the best part of this dish, with the small smattering of tomato chunks being number two. But everything else mixes poorly with the sauce. This is a honey glaze, so it’s quite sweet, and it belongs far away from Brussel’s sprouts. Yes, this dish is chock full of those little round veggies that gave you nightmares as a child. As adults, we no longer recoil in horror at the site of these green veggie balls — in fact, when done right they can be a treat — but we can’t really figure out what sort of person would put a sweet glaze on Brussel’s sprouts.
The hearty Russet potatoes are another strange choice. They’re nice and savory here — and there’s a generous portion of the things — but the honey glaze is definitely the wrong topping. The conflicting flavors are very off-putting for us.
Now, we must point out that the sauce is quite good, and it might have done quite well in a rice-based dish with perhaps some snap peas and peppers. Conversely, a hearty gravy might have been better with the potatoes and Brussel’s sprouts. It certainly would have been a better complement to the flavor.
But as is, we can’t really recommend Healthy Choice’s Honey Balsamic Chicken. It feels too conflicted about what it wants to accomplish, flavor-wise.
But on a brighter note, it’s only got 210 calories.
If you want to know more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
