Looks: Well, the squash and cranberries look right. Maybe they forget to put the turkey in this one… 1.5 out of 5
Taste: The highlight of this meal was the cranberries that were mixed in with the squash. The turkey was so hard to find in the potatoes that I’m not sure it was there, and the potatoes (or possibly turkey covered in potatoes) were alternately mushy and lumpy, without hardly any flavor at all. 1.5 out of 5
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: I struggled mightily to free this pot pie from its cardboard baking pan so as to have it resemble the boxpie as much as possible, but I was not successful. Then, I tried to cut out a wedge from the top of the crust like on the package, but the roof caved in, and I was not successful. Finally, I tried to show the contents spilling out as on the box, but I couldn’t find any pieces big enough, and thus, I was not successful. The majority of the filling was gravy, as contrasted with the meaty chunks shown on the packaging. The color of the crust is about the only thing they got right. 1 out of 5
Taste: This pot pie was really more of a gravy sandwich, and that’s what it tasted like – crust, gravy, crust, with a few bits of meat and vegetable that got in the way. I shouldn’t have been surprised – according to the box, the main ingredient in the filling is gravy, while containing “2% or less” beef, carrots, and potatoes. Can you really call it a “Beef Pot Pie” when “beef” is an also-ran in the ingredients list? 1.5 out of 5
Reader Dena Struchtemeyer sent in this review of Healthy Choice’s Sweet Asian Potstickers:
“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.”
Preaching truth to packaging. Pictures of packaged food, cooked to specifications, compared to the photo on the box.
