We do appreciate what Lean Cuisine is trying to do with their Life Cuisine line — serving up larger portion sizes while focused on things like protein content or gluten-free alternatives to other meals. But we have to admit that the results have been a bit mixed. While some of these meals are excellent, others can be a bit lacking.
So we’re trying to not get our hopes too high before we jump into the Life Cuisine High Protein Lifestyle Greek Style Chicken Bowl today. While this does look super tasty, we’re approaching this with measured hesitation.
This is super easy to cook. Pop it into the microwave for three minutes, give it a stir, and pop it back in for another minute. Lean Cuisine meals are rarely tricky to cook, and this one certainly doesn’t require anything fancy to get it heated up. (If you want to read the cooking instructions straight off the box, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Let’s talk about the chicken right away. Lean Cuisine’s chicken can be hit or miss, but this stuff is actually really good. It’s delightfully soft and has a really great natural flavor to it. That flavor, of course, is only enhanced by the sauce.
The sauce here is a lemon garlic vinaigrette, and it’s a bit more citrusy than we were expecting. With lemon, garlic, and vinegar, it’s hard to predict which of those flavors is going to be dominant, because they’re all so potent. Here, the lemon flavor is subtle at first, but it slowly makes its way to the surface, eventually overpowering everything else.
The rest of the meal is a blend of whole wheat orzo, lentils, chickpeas, peppers, and spinach. It makes for a great flavor combo, but the consistency is a bit soupy. There’s nothing here that would serve as a base (like a rice or a quinoa — or even a bed of lettuce), so the overall consistency suffers a bit.
There is some feta cheese in the mix, but it’s surprisingly muted. Feta is typically a pretty potent flavor, but there are a lot of really strong flavors vying for attention here, causing the feta to get a bit buried. It’s quite good on the rare occasion that it manages to make it to the surface, but it’s hardly noticeable most of the time.
This bowl contains 370 calories and 700 mg of sodium. That means it’s a little higher in calories than your average Lean Cuisine meal, but it’s right on par in the sodium department. Note that frozen meals tend to be high in sodium across the board — 700 mg is average for a frozen meal, but that’s still quite a lot of sodium.
The Life Cuisine High Protein Lifestyle Greek Style Chicken Bowl has a great flavor combo, but it ends up kind of soupy and soggy. This is a meal that needed a foundation to mitigate the soupiness. As is, the consistency can be a bit off-putting. The lemon flavor might be a little too intense for some people as well. Overall, we’d say this is good but not great.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
