We put the Healthy Choice brand on timeout for a while after one of their Power Bowls started a fire in our microwave (yes, that really happened!) However, we’ve recently come back to the line to see what they’d been up to in the time we spent apart. It’s like meeting with an old friend — well, an old frienemy is more like it.
Healthy Choice’s Simply Steamers line isn’t a fire hazard the way the Power Bowls line can be, so we’re not as worried out the Healthy Choice Grilled Pesto & Vegetables catching fire as we were about some of the other meals we reviewed recently.
This is easy enough to cook. Simply pop it into the microwave for four and a half minutes and you’re almost done. The weird part is that Simply Steamer dishes come in a colander that keeps the main portion of the meal elevated above the sauce while it cooks. After it’s all heated up, you’ll need to dump the colander into the main dish and give it a good stir.
For some of Healthy Choice’s, the colander thing really works. For others, it feels like a gimmick. This meal is in the latter category, as we can see no reason why the chicken and veggies were better off not simmering in the sauce. It doesn’t make the meal better, and since the veggies are kind of soggy anyway, this separation didn’t help in the most important way it should have.
Now, a point of clarity here. This is not the similarly-named Healthy Choice Grilled Chicken Pesto with Vegetables, which is a pasta dish. Instead, this is a veggie-and-chicken bowl with a basil pesto sauce.
The chicken here is pretty decent. It has a bit of a lean flavor, but that’s supplemented with a citrusy twist that we really can’t explain. It tastes like someone added a spritz of lime here, but according to the ingredients list, that’s not true. Still, it has a nice flavor, and the consistency isn’t too mushy or gristly.
The rest of the meal is just a pile of vegetables. It’s mostly broccoli and cauliflower, though there are peas in the mix as well. None of it is particularly mind-blowing. The cauliflower is probably the best of the batch, as the broccoli doesn’t taste as fresh as it should and the peas are kind of mushy.
The basil pesto sauce does a fair amount of work here, and it definitely increases the overall quality of the dish, but not enough to really make it interesting. As is, this is a pretty good chicken in a pretty good sauce, bulked up with a serving of mediocre veggies.
If you can believe it, this meal only contains 200 calories, which makes it especially diet-friendly. There’s 600 mg of sodium, however, which is lower than average for a frozen meal, but still pretty high in general. Also, this is not very filling. We’re pretty sure we were just as hungry after eating this as we were before we started.
The Healthy Choice Grilled Pesto & Vegetables doesn’t live up to its true potential. Fresher veggies could have made this a standout dish, but in its current state, it’s just kind of so-so. It’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not worth going out of your way for. That calorie count, though, is pretty hard to beat.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Healthy Choice frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
