We love frozen chicken here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, and we also love mac and cheese, so we think we’re probably smack in the middle of the target demographic for the Banquet Chicken Fingers with Mac & Cheese. Still, we know better than to get our hopes up to high, as frozen meals that pair a protein with mac and cheese don’t exactly have a great track record.
Heating this is fast, though there are a couple extra steps that you might not expect. First, you’ll need to remove the chicken fingers and nuke the mac for a minute. Then give the mac a good stir and put the chicken fingers back into the dish. Give it another minute and a half to two and a half minutes in the microwave. We went with two minutes in the second phase (for a total of three minutes), and that seemed like more than enough time. Our macaroni was boiling at that point.
If you don’t want to use the microwave, you can also cook this in the oven if you’d like to try that. Just know that this will take considerably more time. (To read the full cooking instructions off the back of the box, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
As you can see in the image below, this isn’t much to look at. It’s not a big meal — in fact, it’s not even a medium-sized meal — and it’s not pretty. One of our reviewers commented that it looked like prison food, though we’re not sure how they know that (maybe we should do more thorough background checks!)
We started with the mac and cheese, because that was the part we were the most excited about. It’s not bad at all. It’s nice and creamy, and it has a rich, cheddary flavor that we really enjoyed. The pasta is a little bit mushy, but it does the trick just fine. If we had a full serving of just mac and cheese, we think we’d be pretty okay with it.
The chicken strips are another story. While the breading tastes fine, it ends up soggy in the middle and kind of hard around the edges. As for the chicken itself, it’s pretty bland, and the consistency is really weird. We’re struggling to aptly describe how this feels in our mouth — it seems kind of dried out and overly processed. Perhaps a dipping sauce of some sort might hide this a little bit, but we just ate ours plain. Probably not our best decision.
This whole package contains 310 calories and 730 mg of sodium. That wouldn’t be bad for a full meal, but this is really more of a snack than a meal. Our package only contained three chicken fingers and a super tiny portion of mac and cheese that was gone way too fast.
The Banquet Chicken Fingers with Mac & Cheese takes some really bad chicken strips and pairs them with a serviceable macaroni. If there were more macaroni, we could have probably dunked the chicken in it and made for a halfway decent meal, but there’s really hardly any macaroni here. With a normal sized spoon, you could probably eat all the mac and cheese in three or four bites.
Of course, all of this just made us curious about trying Banquet’s mac and cheese offerings. We’ll definitely be trying some of those in the future.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Banquet frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
