We haven’t had much luck with Eating Well’s line of frozen food.
Their gimmick is that every meal comes vacuum-sealed in a tidy little package that is supposed to keep them ludicrously fresh but really only serves to make every meal look like somebody stepped on it. The packaging bubbles out when you cook it, so at least you can pretend you’re eating some sort of future space food. So far, our best Eating Well meal was their Indian Inspired Chicken, and that was slightly above mediocre at best.
So you have to imagine that we weren’t thrilled to be checking out Eating Well’s Steak Carne Asada. Also, we think the word Steak in the title is a little redundant, since Carne Asada loosely translates to roast beef. So the translated title of this meal is Steak Roast Beef? Come on, Eating Well, get your naming convention in order!
This meal also takes way too long to cook. Depending on the wattage of your microwave, the instructions call for up to nine minutes of cook time. And then you must let it cool for two to three minutes before eating (although we recommend more than that because this thing comes out sizzling like a fajita plate at a Mexican restaurant). That might be the longest cook time we’ve seen on a microwavable meal.
While this doesn’t look quite as stepped-on as some of Eating Well’s other dishes, it’s not without its flaws.
Let’s begin with the steak. It’s dry and even crunchy in places. It’s way too tough so it’s difficult to chew, and it doesn’t taste very good. It attempts to soak up some of the flavor from the roja sauce, but even that doesn’t help much.
The sauce, however, is actually quite good. It’s the part of this meal we found the tastiest, but there wasn’t enough of it. Perhaps more sauce would have covered a bit of the bad steak flavor, which would have been welcome indeed.
There’s a mix of veggies on the side, which is pretty much your standard southwestern-style veggie mix: corn, black beans, and red bell peppers. Normally, a mix like this would go all-out on the black beans and just dot the meal with the other two vegetables, but this one takes a different approach. Here, this mix is weighted toward the corn. It’s an odd choice, but it was likely made to cover up the fact that the black beans are awful. In fact, we might even use the word crusty to describe them.
That just leaves the brown rice, which is as bland as you’d expect brown rice to be. If there were more roja sauce, this might not be a problem, because it would mix well with the rest of the dish and taste fine. But without the sauce, the rice just doesn’t really have much appeal.
This meal contains 340 calories (110 from fat), which isn’t unreasonable, but it takes this out of the realm of the more diet-focused meals we’ve tried. It also has 640 mg of sodium, which isn’t all that bad for a frozen meal, though it’s still not what we’d call a healthy sodium amount.
When it comes to the Steak Carne Asada, Eating Well needs to go back to the drawing board. This is an unpleasant meal whose one saving grace is the sauce, which there’s simply not enough of. This meal needs better quality ingredients if it wants to skimp on the sauce, because their badness is way too obvious when they’re not drowning in something with some real flavor.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
