Price: $2.50
Serving: 1 packagea, 10.3 oz.
Calories: 260
Fat: 12%, 8g
Cholesterol: 22%, 65mg
Sodium: 35%, 840mg
Protein: 29g
Carbs: 8%, 23g
Fiber: 32%, 8g

South Beach Diet says: Breast strips with rib meat and fettuccine pasta in alfredo sauce and tomatoes, with broccoli, red bell peppers, and yellow carrots

Jenn says: All good things must come to an end. Today, my love affair with South Beach Diet food is coming to an end. To say this was a love affair would be putting it mildly as South Beach has reigned atop my world of frozen entrees since its inception. Seeing South Beach Diet food on sale made for a great trip to the grocery store. The meat was real, the sauces snappy and the vegetables plentiful. However, the Chicken Alfredo a la Roma is none of these.

As you can see from the picture, the chicken in the actual meal is no where near the size of the chicken on package. Lean Cuisine alfredo sauce outshines South Beach Diet alfredo sauce any day. And the vegetables were mushy. While I’ve never actually been on the real South Beach Diet, (my friend Dana did it and got so hungry in a meeting that she started shaking) I supported meals that were full of real meat and ample amounts of vegetables. Chicken Alfredo a la Roma needs to be kicked out of the South Beach Diet family. It’s giving its brothers and sister on the frozen food and snack food aisles a bad name.

Price: $2.50 (on sale)
Serving: 1 container, 10 oz.
Calories: 270
Fat: 17%, 11g
Sodium: 28%, 660mg
Protein: 44%, 28g
Carbohydrates: 4%, 13g
Fiber: 16%, 4g

South Beach says: Grilled breast strips with rib meat with garlic and herb sauce and green beans almondine.

Abi says: This meal contains an impressive amount of protein. Unfortunately, it contains sauces that render the chicken and green beans inedible, therefore the 44% of your recommended daily allowance of protein is useless.

I lack the sophisticated scientific machinery necessary to confirm that the sauce in Kraft’s South Beach Diet Garlic Herb Chicken actually contained garlic or herbs. Instead, I can only wonder why Kraft had to take some decent chicken breast strips (no measly cubes here!) and cover them with this much sauce. It reminded me of childhood experimentation with the spice cupboard at home and the horrific spiced milk that I couldn’t convince my little brother to drink.

But maybe you like extremely strong yet unidentifiable sauces. In that case, you’d love the green beans, which should be awesome (slices of almond, yum), but end up floating in a pool of oily water. Ok, I don’t know if it was actually oil, but it had the definite sheen of a city puddle after a rainstorm.

If you’re not eating this meal in front of other people, I highly recommend blotting each item with a paper towel before consumption. If that is not a feasible option, then you could just scrape the chicken pieces along the side of the tray, hoping to rid yourself of as much sauce as possible, while saving your dignity.

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.

Price: $2.00 (woo, Shopper’s Warehouse!)
Serving: 1 meal, 10.3 oz.
Calories: 300
Fat: 17%, 11g
Cholesterol: 27%, 80mg
Sodium: 37%, 890mg
Protein: 32g
Carbs: 6%, 18g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
WW Points: 6 Points

South Beach says: Breast strips with rib meat, red peppers, and peanuts in kung pao sauce with broccoli, water chestnuts and yellow peppers

Abi says: Three thoughts went through my brain as I put this meal in the microwave.

1. That is not enough sauce for all that chicken.
2. Is that all chicken? Wow, that’s a lot of chicken.
3. That is far too little sauce for all of that chicken.

It turns out that I’m horrible at estimating the sauce quantity in a frozen item. Once I’d microwaved the meal for four minutes (stirring the chicken after the three minute mark), I realized that there was precisely the perfect amount of sauce to coat the enormous mound of chicken in the tray. South Beach’s chicken is terrific in a ‘boiled chicken’ sort of way.

Fortunately for the chicken (and your tongue), South Beach’s sauce is among the best pseudo-Chinese sauces I’ve tasted in a frozen meal. Another plus: peanuts. While microwaving peanuts might not be your idea of fun, I found that this meal contained the perfect peanut to chicken ratio, with at least one peanut (or half peanut) to each chunk of chicken.

Usually vegetables are the savior of a meal. They’ve pulled through for me time after time with their bright color and high nutritional content. Plus, they have fiber, which is important when you’re eating a lot of microwavable meals. In the case of South Beach’s Kung Pao Chicken, the vegetables were a dismal reminder that the microwave does not always play nice with bell peppers or broccoli. Sure, the water chestnuts were crispy, but if I ever found a non-crunchy water chestnut, the world would probably implode.