Healthy Choice Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables Review

Healthy Choice Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables

The Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables by Healthy Choice is a clever, lightweight take on a chicken pasta salad. It looks like something that would be right up our alley, and it only has 290 calories, so we decided to give it a try. It’s listed as having a Wight Watchers SmartPoints value of 8, in case you’re curious about that.

Like Healthy Choice’s other Café Steamers dishes, this one includes a colander that keeps the main bulk of the meal elevated above the sauce while it’s cooking. You then simply pour the colander into the sauce bowl beneath it and stir.

Healthy Choice Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables

This isn’t always a good way to heat a frozen meal, but here it works just as it should. Usually, we tend to have problems with rice-based meals, as those don’t seem as natural a fit for this method as a good pasta does.

Now, this is a dish that clearly has an appreciation for zucchini. The chunks are huge here, unlike the tiny little cubes that some frozen dishes try to pass off as zucchini. The texture is perfect, and the taste may not be straight-out-of-the-garden fresh, but it’s still pretty fresh for a frozen food.

Healthy Choice Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables

The spinach, on the other hand, was clearly not on Healthy Choice’s mind when they created this dish. There are sprinkles of it here and there but they sort of dissolve into the meal and hide at the bottom of the bowl. If you try this meal, don’t expect to chew on a nice, thick chunk of cooked spinach.

The chicken is oddly dry and crumbly. This might not have mattered so much if it was doused in a rich, creamy sauce, but the pesto sauce here is pretty thin. If you can get a bite with a good amount of chicken, zucchini, and noodles, you can sort of hide the dryness a bit.

And speaking of noodles, we really love the rotini shapes here. They complement this dish nicely, and they soak up the pesto sauce in a way other shapes would fail to.

Healthy Choice’s Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables is a pretty good dish, though it’s much better if you pick out the chicken. Had they skipped the meat altogether and made this a vegetarian-friendly dish, we’d recommend it strongly. As is, we only recommend it to people who are willing to either put up with the dry chicken or simply pick it out.

If you’d like to know more about the nutrition or ingredients in this frozen food, check out our package scan below.

Healthy Choice Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables

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