Review: Lean Cuisine ® Chicken Pecan

In an effort to eat healthier, I've been on the look out for food that is easy to prepare, tasty, and nutritious. When at home, I cook, but I often take frozen meals to work so that I don't have to mess with making a lunch every morning.

Recently, when Lean Cuisine ® products were on sale, I stocked up on them to have a ready supply for my freezer at both work and home.

Yesterday I ate the Lean Cuisine ® Chicken Pecan meal. Here are the facts on the taste, ease of preparation and nutritional value of this meal.

One thing I always look at first is the calorie count. The Lean Cuisine ® Chicken Pecan meal weighs in at a conservative 260 calories, a nice calorie count for a single meal, while dieting. This Lean Cuisine ® meal contains 6 grams of fat and 0 grams of trans fat. This meal provides 35% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin A, 6% of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C, and 4% of the recommended daily allowance of calcium. It has no preservatives or artificial flavors. As an added bonus, this meal includes whole grain brown rice, which adds to the healthy benefits.

Preparation of the Lean Cuisine ® Chicken Pecan meal is easy. After removing the tray from the box, simply slit the plastic covering the food and cook in the microwave on high for 3 - 4:30 minutes. After cooking, let it stand in the microwave for 1-2 minutes, so you can remove it without burning yourself. Remove the plastic cover, and the meal is ready to eat.

Okay, I was pleased with the nutritional information and with the easy preparation, but what about the taste? Overall I was pleased with the taste of this Lean Cuisine diet meal. The chicken was all white-meat and was in a savory sauce. The rice had snap peas that were delightfully crisp, in spite of the fact that they had been frozen. The rice also contained small julienne bits of carrots. My only complaints are that the rice was rather dry, and there were very few pecans, especially when you consider that the word, "pecan" is in the name of the product. To remedy the dry rice problem, after consuming my chicken, I mixed the sauce from the chicken into the rice, which added moisture and flavor to the meal.

In spite of the minor complaints I had about Lean Cuisine ® Chicken Pecan, overall I was pleased with the product and would buy it again.