Smart Ones Fruit Inspirations Orange Sesame Chicken

May 6, 2008 | Reviewer: Jess

Smart Ones Fruit Inspirations Orange Sesame Chicken Price: $3.19 (Free to me)
Serving: 1
Calories: 320 per serving
Fat: 12%, 8g
Cholesterol: 7%, 20mg
Sodium: 28%, 680mg
Protein: 14g
Carbohydrates: 16%, 48g
Fiber: 8%, 2g
Sugar: 12g
Weight Watchers Points: 7 Points

Smart Ones says: Smart Ones Fruit Inspirations meals are delicious new recipes inspired by the natural goodness of fruit. Now you can make every bite count with wonderful dishes that combine the intense flavor of real fruit into your everyday meals of juicy meat or poultry and crisp vegetables. Smart Ones. Taste so good, you want to be good.

Jess says: I recently opted to attend a sales and marketing training held by my company. I was actually glad I went as it was pretty interesting and there were thankfully no Glengarry Glen Ross references. Now, with my new sales maverick skills I can see right through Smart Ones thinly veiled marketing ploy with this line of meals. These are not new frozen meals using fruit in innovative ways but rather they are established fruit-using items. It is not inspirational to add cranberries to turkey and stuffing, nor is it revolutionary to use a citrus sauce for a chicken and rice dish. These items are merely being rebranded so as to now appear new, interesting and different and cause the jaded microwave meal eater to choose this meal from among the large freezer case aisle of sameness.

Does the marketing ploy taint the deliciousness? Not for this meal. The sauce was quite good if you appreciate a good sweet and sour syrupyness to your lunch. This, incidentally, is not Abi, which she will tell you with passion if you mention such food items. I do love sweet and sour flavor blends and so I made sure to get fork fulls of that corn starchy goop with each bite of rice and chicken. The orange essence is definitely palpable here, in a good way. I think that is because they use orange juice concentrate. So if you are not an orange person a) why did you even think about this meal? And b) it does taste like orange, so don’t eat it. However, back to marketing ploys, you will see on the box large orange chunks of what look like juicy mandarin oranges. Not so in real life my friend, at least not in my box. I did sometimes see orange hued strings that could have once belonged to an intact orange but this was just my best guess because of the context clues. The pepper bits were also much much smaller in real life. The chicken pieces were ample. The breading got a little too soggy for my liking, but they tasted just fine.

Overall, Orange Sesame Chicken was pretty filling for a Smart Ones meal. It is pretty much on the same level as Lean Cuisine’s Sweet and Sour Chicken, which I will purchase whenever it is on sale. This meal was entirely worth the nothing I paid for this. Oh that’s right. I’m a deal maker now! Always be closing, readers, always be closing.

[This meal from free from the folks at Smart Ones’ Public Relations company -Ed.]

comments

5 Responses to “Smart Ones Fruit Inspirations Orange Sesame Chicken”

Chavi on May 6th, 2008

Isn’t it amazing that Lean Cuisine can make this dish for fewer points (if only by one) than Weight Watchers itself!?

Shocking, but it was delicious — I gave it a try, too
Fluffy on May 6th, 2008

I just tried this one the other day and found that it tastes of all sweet peppers and no orange. Which, given that I’m not a pepper fan, didn’t work for me. Odd that it tasted so non-orange to me and so orange to you…
Jess on May 7th, 2008

Fluffy, maybe we found two different portions of the same batch and my serving stole all the orange flavor from yours? Or something like that.
Abi Jones on May 7th, 2008

Sweet and sour sauce makes me gag, which is why it is so confusing that I used my coupon for a free Smart Ones meal to get this.

I guess I thought it would be better than the beef and pineapple one.
Rose on May 8th, 2008

I like sweet and sour chicken, but nothing else. this looks like it has too much sauce. I’ve had a few different frozen sweet and sour chicken dishes, they all were terrible….terrible.