About Eat Like Me

Hi everyone! Welcome to the Eat Like Me blog! I'm Emma- a Nutrition major & kind of a health nut! I'm really into eating healthy & nourishing my body. It amazes me how much food can really affect your life and change the way you feel. I've been into healthy eating since I was a teen and I wanted to share my interest with all of you! I'll admit that I have days when I do not make the best food choices but my goal is to just get back on track and stay healthy as often as I can. Of course, eating healthy doesn't mean I don't get to enjoy my food. There are lots of flavorful, healthy foods & recipes, and even desserts! On this blog I will share with you what I eat, along with recipes & pictures. You could use my blog as a guide to healthy eating, or just for recipes and ideas!

Monday, November 8, 2010

Healthy Choice Frozen Entree Review

Okay so I've been busy and haven't had the time to post all my meals every day, but as soon as things calm down again I'll resume my blogging. In the meantime, I'd like to share a few frozen meals I've tried recently. Healthy Choice has made some changes and is now offering some new, healthier entrees. In the past Healthy Choice entrees weren't actually so healthy. They contained lots of no-good, unrecognizable ingredients, and didn't provide all that much nutrition. Now, for the first time ever, Healthy Choice entrees are actually becoming healthy! Made with real ingredients, and nothing hidden, here's a few that I felt were worth trying:

Healthy Choice Creamy Basil Pesto:
This dish is a blend of whole grain pasta, broccoli, and tomatoes in a creamy pesto sauce, topped with mozzarella cheese. It's in Healthy Choice's new line of All Natural entrees, which means all real ingredients and no preservatives! From a nutritional standpoint, this dish is low in calories, and for a creamy pesto sauce, low in fat as well. It has 10g of protein, 5g of fiber, and only 450 mg of sodium. Being that most frozen meals are off-the-chart high in sodium, anything less than 600 mg is ideal. The dish is also made with whole grains, and unlike Healthy Choice's old products, has a completely understandable list of ingredients. Healthy Choice is definitely improving.. Their dishes are finally actually becoming healthy. As for the taste, this dish had a good, but somewhat simple taste. The "creamy" sauce was light and the basil was thankfully not overwhelming. The spiral shaped pasta surprisingly held the sauce well, and the tomatoes added a nice touch. The cheese, although there wasn't much, added a pleasant saltiness. The worst part of the meal had to be the broccoli. It tasted far from fresh and was almost flavorless. There also wasn't very much of it since the dish was skimpy on veggies. More would've added more volume and made the meal a bit more substantial. But I guess that's what you get in a portion-controlled meal. Overall, I enjoyed this meal and I would most-likely buy it again in the future. For more click here.

Healthy Choice Chicken Romano Fresca:
This dish is a combination of whole-grain pasta, chicken, broccoli, and red peppers in Romano cheese & a butter glaze sauce. The dish has only 230 calories, and 5 grams of fat, but packs in 16 grams of lean protein. As advertised, it was made with pretty good ingredients, all of which were recognizable & understandable. It also has only 490 mg of sodium, so it satisfies the guidelines for frozen meals. Nutritionally, this meal scored pretty high, but unfortunately the taste didn't rise to the same level. The chicken was low quality and tasted overly-processed, and the noodles were a little too flimsy to hold the sauce well enough. The broccoli and peppers also didn't taste fresh, in fact the broccoli barely had any flavor at all. The only part of the meal that I actually really liked was the sauce. It was creamy and had a nice buttery flavor that spread throughout the dish. Butter-sauce wouldn't usually be included in a "healthy" meal, but in this case it worked pretty well & clearly didn't add too many calories or fat. Overall I think this meal was okay, but I probably wouldn't bother buying it again since there's so many better options out there. For more click here.

Healthy Choice Rosemary Chicken & Sweet Potatoes
Healthy Choice really made this one sound good, which made it even more disappointing when I found this dish to be the complete opposite. It's described as savory chicken tenderloins blended with pearl onions, sweet potatoes, and yellow carrots in a rosemary garlic sauce. Sounds yummy right? And then there's the fact that there's only 170 calories in the entire meal, and according to the box it contains 50% of the daily vegetable servings and clocks in at 12 grams of lean protein. I couldn't wait to try this one, I thought I had found myself a new low-cal favorite. Boy was I wrong! To start, it all looked really processed, which is the complete opposite of what you'd expect when you a stamp that reads "Fresh taste from quality ingredients." As for the taste, the "sweet" potatoes were hardly even sweet, and the sauce was almost inedible. I thought that chicken was alright until I bit into a piece of pure fat, which was just plain unappetizing. The only part of the meal I actually liked were the carrots, and the pearl onions weren't all that bad, but just didn't seem to fit in. It may have been better with regular (not sweet) potatoes, but the rosemary-sweet combo just didn’t work for me. After finishing the meal I decided to check out some other online reviews to see if it was just me, or if other people felt the same way. I was glad to find that it wasn't just me. Some of the reviews I looked at were really cruel, and I couldn't find a single one that talked positively about the meal. I wouldn’t say it was absolutely terrible, but I most definitely wont be buying it again. For more click here.

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