Ah, lunchtime. Those thirty magical minutes when you can forget about the troubles of your job, the upcoming credit card bills, and your soul-crushing loneliness. All food brings comfort, but there’s nothing in the world that will lift your spirit like a bowl full of vegetables. Yes sirree, with their fresh taste unlocked by the magic of steam, this meal of “Grilled (but actually steamed) Mediterranean (but also found in America) Vegetables” is just what you need to turn that frown upside-down. (Note: Upside-down frown may not be experienced by all customers.)

The best part of this meal is the obvious lack of meat. You won’t have to waste time on tender marinated chicken or juicy slow-cooked beef just to get to the delicious vegetable side dishes, like in most meals. When you open this box, you’ll feel like you died and went to heaven… vegetable heaven, that is! The broccoli tastes like broccoli. The eggplant tastes like eggplant. And the snozzberries — don’t get me started on the snozzberries!

Who cares if you’ve been taking cold showers for a week because you’re late on the gas bill? So what if your wife left you and took your dog with her? You’ve still managed to keep the lights on, and that’s worth a reward. So set your microwave for two and a half minutes, and let your cares drift away – you’ve got some eating to do.

Looks: 5 out of 5 Taste: 3 out of 5

Dena’s potstickers:

My potstickers:

Looks: Not as vibrant or as fresh as the box depicts, but much moreso than Dena’s. The portion sizes are accurate though. 3.5 out of 5

Taste: The potstickers were chewy (the way I like them), but the filling was mostly tasteless – tofu is not known for its flavor. On the other hand, the rice surrounding the potstickers was terrible; gritty and dry, completely unpalatable. I’d eat the potstickers again if I was able to get them for free, but I’d still throw the rice away. 2 out of 5

Looks: Everything’s on the up-and-up, except for the usual problem that the directions instruct you to stir the meal, but the meal on the box is obviously not stirred. Come on! 4.5 out of 5

Taste: When I saw “five-spice” on the box, I expected something spicy. (Five-spicy, to be exact.) But the sauce had no spice, only sweetness – it tasted and smelled like gingerbread cookies. Also, the beef was dry, as most microwave beef is, and the rest of the ingredients had no taste except for the overwhelming sauce. (Note: the ingredients list does not list “beef”; it lists “cooked beef and binder product.” Take that for what you will.) 2.5 out of 5

Looks: The chicken pieces aren’t as large or as plentiful as pictured, and the sauce is much more prominent. The vegetables and overall portion size are close enough. 4 out of 5

Taste: I liked this one a lot – the rice was cooked just so, and the chicken was juicy. The vegetables were just the right amount of crunchy, but he sauce was maybe a little too sweet. (Although, in all my years, I’ve never tasted the “sour” of “sweet and sour” chicken. Is there something wrong with me?) 4.5 out of 5

These photos and descriptions come courtesy of reader Amy Hill.

Looks: “There’s some room for variation here, since you have packets of sauce/rice/chicken/vegetables and have to put them together yourself, so if the chicken doesn’t get as brown as on the package that might just be your fault for not following directions. Still, it looks almost exactly like the package (note that the IRL photo shows only one serving, while the package shows two).” 5 out of 5

Taste: “Sweet and spicy sauce; good amount of vegetables; not greasy at all. Better than a lot of Chinese takeout, even. My one complaint is that the servings are a bit small for the price.” 4.5 out of 5

If you, like Amy, want to read about your own food on the Internet, send your photos to food@foodirl.com. On the other hand, if you like Amy, that is something I cannot help you with.

Looks: You’d be forgiven for wondering why I took a picture of this meal after I chewed it and spit it back out, but hold onto your butts: that’s what it actually looks like immediately after cooking. The vegetables still look frozen, and the chicken and rice mixture is pale, mushy, and completely unappetizing. 1 out of 5

Taste: Worse than it looks. The vegetables were flavorless, and while the chicken and rice had a flavor, it wasn’t one I’d like to taste again anytime soon – bitter, oily, gritty, disgusting: much like my last foray into microwave chicken and rice. 0 out of 5

Looks: Rice has exactly two properties: size and color. This rice fails miserably at color – dark brown instead of golden yellow. 2.5 out of 5

Taste: Gross. Gummy, with a strange taste that doesn’t bring chicken to mind. I managed a bite and a half before giving the rest to my dog Pedro, who normally doesn’t complain about my leftovers, but even he was like “Why would you feed me this?” (Well, he really said “Bark bark bark,” but I knew what he meant.) 0 out of 5

Looks: The meals I don’t plate properly (usually for lack of time, but sometime for lack of dishes) are a little harder to judge, but when you take each section separately, you’ll see that this meal stacks up closely to its box. Not only does it have the first apple crisp I’ve seen with substantially size apple pieces, most of the colors and portions of the other foods are right on as well. (The poor lighting in my kitchen doesn’t do the steak justice.) 4.5 out of 5

Taste: Just so I don’t have to say this again, the apple crisp that is in essentially every Healthy Choice meal is very good – +1 point by default. I really enjoyed the steak part of this meal, but I wasn’t digging the rice or corn (due to their blandness), until I had an epiphany: bland rice and vegetables plus steak with too much southwestern sauce equals a delicious Tex-Mex casserole. They should recommend that combination on the box, because it was really good. (-1 point if you don’t like mixing foods together.) 4 out of 5

“I recently tried Healthy Choice’s ‘Sweet Asian Potstickers’ meal. That was a mistake. Notice how the ‘sauce’ looks like sewage? Not a coincidence. By the time the meal was cooked, the rice, carrots and potstickers had become thoroughly soaked in the sauce. As a result, the entire thing tasted like a sickly-sweet soy sauce. Except that is, for the stuffing inside the potstickers. The concoction was so dry that it seemed almost shocking compared to the other soaked parts of the meal.”

“The potstickers aren’t even the same shape or color as on the box and the potsticker casing is so chewy that I almost flung half the meal across the room trying to eat it. That nice creamy on sauce on the box? It’s nonexistent. The nicely chopped green onions? They’re nonexistent too. The large chopped pieces of bell pepper? You guessed it, nonexistent. The whole thing was awful.”

Looks: Surprisingly accurate for a dish containing chicken, vegetables, and sauce. A few small differences though cause this meal to miss a perfect 5-out-of-5 score: The sauce (pictured as being poured over the dish) is obviously mixed in, the greens are a little wilted, and the green onions are MIA (or just very small). 4.5 out of 5

Taste: After seeing how close it looked to the box, I expected it to taste as good as it looked too, but I ended up disappointed. The chicken has a strange texture and taste that I wouldn’t have independently classified as chicken; it’s more like a meatball made of poultry. The vegetables don’t have much of a taste either, and they’re a bit too soft to have their texture make up for tastelessness. The sauce-and-rice mixture I had left towards the end of the dish did turn out to be quite tasty – if this meal had been “Sweet & Spicy Orange Zest Rice”, it would have scored higher. 3 out of 5