It’s Thanksgiving in July! Err… May!
Today we’re checking out the Banquet Turkey Meal, and we really can’t help thinking about Thanksgiving. This is a full frozen meal that contains turkey, stuffing, gravy, and mashed potatoes — all the Turkey Day essentials in one place!
Oh, and peas. There are peas here too.
Anyway, this is a cinch to heat up, though it takes slightly longer than your average frozen meal. Pop it into the microwave for three minutes, give each little section a little stir, then pop it back in for two and a half to three more minutes. Out comes a steaming hot turkey dinner! (If you want to read the full cooking instructions for this frozen dinner, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
As you can see in the image below, the tray here has three separate sections. The biggest section contains slices of turkey on top of a pile of stuffing and slathered in gravy. The other two sections contain mashed potatoes and peas. Yes, peas.
Okay, so for as much as we like to poke fun of the peas (who brings peas to Thanksgiving?), these are actually quite good. While the tray section does end up with some water in it, which isn’t exactly appetizing, the peas themselves are tasty. They have a really sweet flavor and a buttery finish. We were honestly expecting to take a bite or two and toss the rest, but we changed our mind once we actually tasted them.
The main event, of course, is the turkey. It’s sliced kind of thin (though thicker than, say, a lunchmeat), but it’s nice and juicy with a lovely texture. It’s hard to taste the actual turkey portion, because it’s soaked in gravy, but that’s not necessarily a complaint. The gravy is quite good, and the portion size seems pretty fair.
The stuffing has a weird consistency. Part of ours ended up squished into one corner of the tray, and that portion was kind of crunchy. The rest of it was soaked in gravy, causing it to be kind of slimy. Despite these issues, the flavor seemed pretty decent. It’s maybe not as potent as we expected, but it’s not a bad flavor by any means.
The mashed potatoes are said to contain cream, so we don’t think we were wrong to expect creamy potatoes here. However, these have almost no flavor. We had one pea fall into our mashed potatoes (which you can probably see in the image above), and that singular pea had more flavor than the entire potato portion.
All of this food contains only 270 calories. Yes, that’s one seriously low-cal take on Thanksgiving dinner. Of course, this also contains 1,340 mg of sodium, which is a ton. In fact, that’s about how much sodium we’d expect in two full frozen dinners, not just one. It’s a lot! Plus, this probably won’t fill you up fully if you’re planning on making a meal of it.
The Banquet Turkey Meal is a halfway decent attempt at whipping up a frozen Thanksgiving dinner. Oddly enough, the peas are the best part of the meal. The star of the show, the turkey, is pretty good, and the gravy really drives it home. The stuffing is just sort of okay and the potatoes are shockingly bland. When you take all that into consideration, we think it’s probably fair to file this in the “good but not great” category.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen dinner, check out our package scans below.
