Let’s be real: Thanksgiving is a ton of work. Baking a turkey alone will take hours and hours, and that’s saying nothing of the prep work that goes into a family-sized batch of mashed potatoes or green bean casserole. There’s just a lot of work involved in preparing a huge Thanksgiving meal.
However, if you want an easy, single-serve version of a Thanksgiving dinner, you’re not without options. Take, for instance, the Marie Callender’s Kentucky Inspired Turkey, Bacon, & Stuffing Bowl, which we’re reviewing today. This bowl is designed with lovers of T-Day in mind.
This is a simple dish to cook: Simply pop it in the microwave for five or six minutes and it’s done (we opted for the full six, because this thing was practically a solid block of ice when we pulled it out of the freezer). You could go with the oven, but then you’re looking at 45 to 50 minutes, which is probably not worth it if you don’t have a bunch of time to kill.
Now, we don’t know much about how they make turkey dinners in Kentucky, so we can’t comment about the authenticity of this dish. What we can comment on, however, is how it tastes from our Midwestern perspective.
First of all, let’s talk about the turkey. It’s actually decent here, with a good amount of holiday flavor. It is a little bit dry, but that can be mitigated by dunking each bite into the provided gravy.
That gravy is perhaps more accurately described as a creamy cheese sauce with garlic. There are also tomatoes and bacon bits mixed into this sauce to give it a little bit of pizazz. The bacon bits bring some oomf to the affair, while the tomatoes feel out of place here. The flavor just doesn’t go well with the rest of the dish, and, to make matters worse, these tomatoes are really bad. The have an almost-rotten flavor that makes them the worst part of this dish by a pretty huge margin. The whole dish is improved if you can pick the tomatoes out and toss them straight into the trash.
Our stuffing sort of melted into a glob on one edge of our bowl. Despite this glooby globby quality, though, it actually tastes pretty decent. It’s an especially good pairing with the cheese sauce, as the savory quality contrasts nicely with the slightly sweet quality of the stuffing.
Unlike an actual Thanksgiving meal, this isn’t loaded with calories. With 300 calories, this is actually a pretty diet-friendly dish. It does have 1,610 mg of sodium, though, which is an absolutely absurd amount of sodium.
The Marie Callender’s Kentucky Inspired Turkey, Bacon, & Stuffing Bowl is no replacement for Grandma’s cooking, but it’s still one of the better frozen turkey dinners we’ve had. We would recommend picking the tomatoes out, though, because they’re especially bad — they’re bad enough that we’re a bit baffled that Marie Callender’s insisted on including them here. The rest of the meal’s components range from good to excellent, so the tomatoes are really unnecessary. With the exception of the tomatoes, though, this is a pretty great turkey dinner.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen turkey bowl, check out our package scans below.
