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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. ~Virgina Woolf

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Kraft South Beach Chicken Monterey Wrap

April 4, 2007 | Reviewer: Andrew

Price: $2.99 for two wraps
Serving: 1 wrap, 4.16oz.
Servings per Container: 1.5
Calories: 220
Fat: 11%, 7g
Cholesterol: 7%, 20mg
Sodium: 19%, 460mg
Protein: 25g
Carbs: 9%, 26g
Fiber: 24%, 6g
Weight Watchers Points: 4 per wrap

Kraft says: Each South Beach Diet Wrap provides a hot, delicious lunch or dinner at home or on-the-go. Enjoy with a small mixed green salad and your favorite South Beach Diet Dressing!

Andrew says: I’ve had good luck with South Beach Diet frozen dinners lately. I’m not on the South Beach Diet, but Kraft has a decent-looking lineup of gourmet-ish diet meals and, for the most part, they’ve been satisfying and tasty.

Still, I should have heeded the alarm bells going off in my head when I decided to buy two boxes of South Beach Diet wraps. How often does a frozen tortilla come out right in the microwave? I think mankind is still waiting. How often does a frozen mish-mash of cheese, meat and veggies reconstitute into anything other than a barfy paste? (I’m looking at you too, Hot Pockets!)

So I brought the Chicken Monterey wraps to work after a disappointing experience earlier in the week with the Denver Omlette-style breakfast wraps (somehow flavorless save for a disgusting onion aftertaste) and hoped for the best. The smell emanating from the microwave wasn’t entirely terrible, so I thought at least I’d get some flavor out of this one.

I guess my first warning sign should have been that the wrap stuck to the paper plate I’d deposited it onto. More accurately, paper plate material stuck to the wrap. Gross. The first bite of the wrap was entirely made up of the whole-wheat tortilla, which had hardened into something resembling card stock. The next bite included some soggier tortilla as well as some melty but flavorless cheese, a bit of completely flavorless chicken, a “red pepper”, and some way-too-mustard-y dijon sauce. There was supposed to be Monterey Jack cheese in there but all I experienced was this awful dijon sauce, filling every taste bud with a sense of nauseous dread.

I ate it all, and I survived. So did the terrible sour dijon aftertaste, unfortunately. But then I thought, “you know, maybe I overcooked it or something. I have one more wrap in the box, I’m going to try it later.” Yes, I am THAT DEDICATED TO FOOD REVIEWING. I adjusted the cooking time down slightly, took one bite and promptly deposited it into the trash. It wasn’t just me: This was pretty awful. I’ll still get other South Beach stuff, but the wraps are by far the worst frozen food I’ve had in months.

Happy Birthday HeatEatReview!

April 3, 2007 | Reviewer: Abi Jones

Today we’re celebrating HeatEatReview.com’s 1 year blogiversary. Yes, we’ve survived an entire year of consuminig everything from Hungry-Man’s frightening Mexican Fiesta to Stop and Shop’s fantastic Apple Blossoms.

I was going to write out ‘HeatEatReview.com’ on a last row of cupcakes until I realized two crucial things:

1. I forgot to add eggs to the mix. This explained why the batter behaved like yellow whipped cream and the baked cupcakes crumbled as I removed them from the tin. Yes, they still tasted good, in a dry, lacking egg sort of way.
2. While I may have made cupcakes for a blog, getting to the point where I write a blog’s name out in frosting might be going a little too far.

Don’t worry, folks at Josh’s house. I served you the good cupcakes. I tossed the bad ones. Do you know how depressing it is to toss a dozen cupcakes in the trash?

Lacking a final row of cupcakes, I decided to tally up some numbers instead:

Hungry-Man Hearty Chicken Parmigiana

April 2, 2007 | Reviewer: Guest Reviewers

Today’s Guest Reviewer is Marvo from The Impulsive Buy.

Price: $3.00 on sale
Serving: 1 tray, 16 oz.
Calories: 720
Fat: 46%, 30g
Cholesterol: 20%, 60mg
Sodium: 78%, 1880mg
Protein: 37g
Carbohydrates: 25%, 75g
Fiber: 28%, 7g
Weight Watchers Points: 16 Points

Hungry-Man says: Hearty chicken parmigiana with spaghetti in marinara with a garlic bread stick.

Marvo says: I thought a Hungry-Man dish would be perfect for me to review. After all, I was hungry, I am a man, and they were on sale at the grocery store where I shop. Oh wait a second, let me double check that “man” part…

Yup, I’m an outie not an innie.

My love for mediocre Italian food was the reason why I decided to pick up the Hungry-Man Hearty Chicken Parmigiana out of all the other Hungry-Man choices. Sure, I could get one of those ‘healthy’ microwave Italian meals with vegetables, less fat, and the ability to make me hungry an hour later, but the bold banner on the lower left hand corner of the Hungry-Man box that said “1 LB. OF FOOD” called to me, much like the ghosts did to Carol Anne through the television in the movie Poltergeist.

While I watched my meal rotate in the microwave for five and a half minutes, because the “1 LB. OF FOOD” banner on the box told me to, I wondered if the noodles would be too tender, like a Lifetime Channel movie. The noodles turned out to be just right, but the marinara sauce tasted like a particular bottled pasta sauce. I’m just not sure which one.

As for the two pieces of breaded chicken, the breading didn’t make them crispy and the edges were a little tough, but they were good when combined with the spaghetti and the mozzarella cheese on top of each piece of chicken.

The bread stick included in the meal was in the microwave for only 45 seconds, but those 45 seconds turned a frozen piece of bread into a chewy piece of bread. Also, the bread stick had a lot garlic grease around it, which made it tasty but also made it kind of slippery. So if you’re in prison and in the shower with it, you might want to think about putting a rope around it.

Overall, the Hungry-Man Hearty Chicken Parmigiana was a tasty meal and filling for this formerly hungry man. Although, there proportionally wasn’t enough spaghetti for the two pieces of chicken and I felt there could’ve been more mozzarella cheese on top of the chicken because I like calcium. Despite these minor issues, I would probably eat it again, but only when my blood pressure goes down, since it has enough sodium to possibly turn me into a salt lick.