Holy Moley, Bertolli!! (Bertolli's Grilled Chicken Alfredo with Portobello Mushrooms)

I was clearing tables at the Diner yesterday, when a Google ad caught my eye. “Discount Frozen Dinners,” it said…and as we specialize in the deep-freeze at the Diner, naturally I read the rest of the ad. It went on to say:

New and Used Frozen Dinners!
Check out the huge selection now! eBay.com

Look, I’m always in the market for a bargain…but I’m going to pass on the used frozen dinners.

Back to work...

In honor of Italy, Torino, and the XX Olympiad, I thought that we should sample something “Italian” this week, so I kept my eyes peeled during my latest trip to the grocery store. Happily, Bertolli indulged my desires, and I picked up a bag of the newest addition to their “Dinners For Two” line, Grilled Chicken Alfredo with Portobello Mushrooms.

As with all Bertolli Dinners For Two, it’s easiness itself to prepare; basically, you open the bag, heat, stir, heat some more and serve. This isn’t cold fusion. Also like all the other products in this line, the ingredient list is simple and straightforward, so for those folks trying to avoid additives, the Bertolli dinners make it easy for you.

The bag contains sliced grilled chicken breast, fettucine pasta, diced tomatoes and Portobello mushrooms in a creamy alfredo sauce with the barest hint of pecorino romano. There are no surprises. This dish is exactly what your mouth is expecting when you think of chicken alfredo. I thought it needed a smidgen of salt, which I added; if you’re a fan of hard cheeses, you might also wish to add a sprinkle of parmesan or romano, but these are just tweaks to an otherwise really good dish. The chicken is tender, the sauce is well-flavored and has a nice body; the diced tomatoes are surprisingly fresh.

The downside is that each “serving” contains a whopping 710 calories, but, having said that, it served me and the Hubster with enough left over for another meal, not two as stated on the bag. If I were consistently trying to stretch it, I’d add a bagged salad on the side and a loaf of “bake-at-home” crusty French bread from the bakery, and this would easily serve three adults or two adults and a child. (To see full nutritional information, ingredients and macronutrient counts for this meal, click here).

For those of you weight-watching, Bertolli has other Dinners For Two that are significantly lower in fat and calories but still deliver outstanding taste. You can check out reviews of other Bertolli dinners by clicking on the “Bertolli Reviews” link on the right-hand side of this page, and that link will take you to a list where you can research the nutritional information for those dinners as well.

Definitely a winner, and a product on the forefront of the new revolution in frozen cuisine. At the Icebox Diner, this dinner gets a Four-Fork rating.

The Michelina's DISadvantage (Michelina's Penne Pollo)

There’s an old saying that you can’t get blood from a stone…but apparently you can milk one to death. At the XX Olympiad, NBC Curling Commentators got their hands on a promotion from a local baker in Pinerolo (the Curling venue) – bread baked in the shape of a curling stone. To create his Ode to Curling, the Pinerolo baker used a dome-shaped bread loaf and jammed the tip of a super-size croissant right into the center. Not satisfied with just giving some coverage to the oddity, NBC scooped up a bunch of the bizarrely-shaped loaves and Curling Commentator Fred Roggin has been handing them out left and right at their Torino studio as gifts to studio guests. My take on the result of this Olympic moment is that this gesture might go over better if these yeasty gifts didn’t resemble a giant dinner roll with a honking big wrinkly banana sticking out of it. The bakers (Guido and his brother, according to Roggin) proudly display their creations in the bakery window, but NBC reports that local Pinerolo residents who are not familiar with Curling find the shape of the loaves “disturbing.” Tune in daily to CNBC’s nightly curling coverage (5:00 p.m. EST to 8:00 p.m. EST) to see which studio guest will get stuffed with “The Roggin Roll.”

And am I the only person who thought that the so-called “peace dove” made up by the white-clad spidermen looked like a drunken pigeon that had impacted your windshield at about 80 mph? After watching those guys shimmying up and down those ropes, I would have been willing to “give peace a chance” if they would just stop.

Back to work….

I nearly fainted when I somehow ended up at a Michelina’s of Canada website page - http://www.michelinas.ca/en/ - that stated “The votes are in. Canadians have-a spoken. This month' s favourite is: Penne Pollo. Pasta and chunks of chicken served in a creamy parmesan sauce.”

Now, I have always thought of our Canadian cousins as pretty much just that – our cousins; Americans with a funny accent and a slightly skewed way of viewing the world at large. But now I suspect that the differences between us may be vaster than I had thought, based upon these polling results. Why? Because I have myself recently tried this very dish, and it was…the nicest language I can find for it is: repulsive.

First, for those of you who have not tried a Michelina’s meal, be warned – the “packaging-as-serving-dish” idea is probably pretty clever from a cost-savings standpoint, but it’s a bit weird to use. Having to lift the now-hot container from the microwave to read the instructions on the box (they did at least think to put a second set of microwave instructions on the side of the box, so you don’t actually have to risk permanent scarring from burns by holding the steaming thing over your head to read the second set of nuking instructions) is annoying. Being only slightly careful, however, it is manageable, although I did not find eating from the box to be appealing in any aesthetic sense.

But, most importantly, the dish was just lousy. Not ordinarily lousy, but lousy in that special way that morphs into dreadful. The penne pasta was just penne; nothing noteworthy. The chicken – or, more accurately, the sole piece of chicken, approximately one inch square, was dark meat and contained something not meant to be eaten – either sinew or cartilage, so the remaining edible portion was even less than the original one inch cube. The sauce was insufficient to actually cover the pasta, so about 20% of the pasta was eaten without sauce…perhaps if there had been enough sauce, it would have had some flavor, but – to use a dreadfully overused phrase – it tasted like papiér maché. I salted; I added parmesan; heck, at that point, I would have added prayer if I thought it would have helped, but to no avail; the dish is just inedible.

So, imagine my amazement when I read this claim on Michelina’s Canadian website! I don’t actually believe that Canadians (despite the whole Curling thing) are a different species than Americans, but this has me scratching my head. Is it that the version of this product produced in Canada by Canadian manufacturers is better than its American counterpart? Do Canadians just have lowered expectations, and hence are less disappointed with the end product? Or is this some nefarious marketing ploy by rogue Michelina’s marketing people – a fake poll?

I have Canadian friends, and I don’t believe for one minute that they would vote for this particular dish, therefore I suspect the latter. Oh, Canada…..don’t be misled by fake pollsters!!

This specific dish gets the Icebox Diner’s Hazardous Waste award for inedibility above and beyond the usual.





For more Reviews from The Icebox Diner, click here.

No Kung Pao "WOW" - (Contessa Kung Pao Shrimp)

I was running errands with the Hubster the other day and got desperately hungry, so we stopped off at an Arby’s. We moseyed inside, ordered at the counter and waited for our chow to arrive. While killing time waiting, I noticed a printed page – regular 8½x11” paper – up on the wall next to the ordering counter. I strolled over and read it. It was apparently a notification of the many services Arby’s offers to accommodate disabled folks. The page was divided into two columns; on the left-hand side was a list of types of disabilities (e.g., hearing-impaired, wheelchair-bound, etc.), and in the right hand column was a bulleted list of what services Arby (“Arby’s will:”) would provide to those particular individuals. The very last item, in about 12-pitch print, read as follows (I’m not making this up):

If you are: Visually Impaired Arby's Will: Read the menu out loud to you; Escort you to your seat.

I realize that whoever wrote this at Arby’s was trying to be considerate, but isn’t this a bit like having a recorded announcement for the hearing-impaired?

Now, back to work for the wicked:

I’ve had some decent success with the Contessa line of skillet meals (I’ve eaten both their Chicken Stir Fry and Chicken Alfredo), so on impulse I picked up their Kung Pao Shrimp skillet dinner the other day. Externally, this appeared to be a pretty appealing dish; shrimp, broccoli, carrots, onions, baby corn, and so forth in a spicy hoisin sauce, plus a serving bag of white rice, all for 200 calories per serving (See: What's In The Box for full nutritional information). According to the back of the bag, there are “about” three servings per bag, which for $7.49, is a pretty decent price.

There are definitely some pros and cons to this meal. First, the preparation is straightforward and simple, but I would caution against using the microwave method unless you drain the cooked entrée before adding the sauce. My entrée was very watery (the Contessa Asian-style meals all seem to have this problem if microwaved instead of sautéed), so I drained it prior to adding the hoisin sauce and peanuts, which seemed to work. The white rice comes in a separate bag, easily nuked for 2-3 minutes.

Now, on to the food itself. Contessa, I’m going to say something to you that I have previously said to Stouffer’s, although about a different ingredient (bell peppers) – onions are not an entrée. Onions are accent; onions are flavor, or nuance; onions are even a condiment…but not the main course. I removed innumerable onions from this dish, and they constituted nearly a cup of the contents. (I substituted a can of el cheapo chopped mushrooms, instead, FYI, and that was fine).

Even with the added mushrooms, however, and included rice, the serving size is impossibly small. The Hubster and I aren’t big eaters, and there was barely enough to feed the two of us. There is not enough entrée, and there isn’t remotely enough rice included for two people, never mind three, which I assume is a reflection of the low-carb craze, or maybe it is just to keep the calories down overall. Either way, the assertion that there are three servings included is laughable, as there are really only a very scant two.

Those are the “cons.” The pros are that the meal is actually pretty tasty, although I would have liked more salt or a heavier hoisin flavor. Hubster liked it, and was particularly fond of the red hot peppers, which surprisingly blow the top of your head off – unusual in any type of frozen entrée. If I was going to make it again (which truthfully I probably won’t – just doesn’t quite rise to the level of flavor I like), I would add some cooked chicken and a wallop of cooked broccoli, and a splash of hoisin sauce. I would also add more peanuts than provided, although I appreciate that they were a nice touch.

Overall…it’s just okay, not great. It doesn’t rise to the level of some of Contessa’s other products, like their Chicken Alfredo, which is really quite good. I applaud their bravery on the spiciness front (the peppers really will surprise you), but I am exasperated by the inclusion of the onions to provide volume, no caloric increase and – let’s face it – because they are cheap. There are any number of other vegetable alternatives that would have worked wonderfully well in this dish (and, by the way, the promised “baby corn” was apparently invisible baby corn) without adding a lot of calories or carbs. If you’re a big lover of onions, however, along with Kung Pao, you might want to give this particular dish a try. If not…give it a pass.

A Panini Genie? (UPDATED: 3/1/06 & 3/15/06)

Well, recent events in the entertainment industry have actually had an impact on me for a change. My father-in-law, who lives in Western Wyoming, has always been a big fan of the mini-series Lonesome Dove. He liked it so much that I made a videotape set of the series for him and gave it to him some years back, and he still pops it in the VCR and watches it fairly often. However, he was reading the paper the other day and learned that Larry McMurtry (author of Lonesome Dove) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) along with Diana Ossana for “Brokeback Mountain.” I’m pretty sure that this means that Dad is just never going to be able to look at Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones and that cattle drive in the same way again.

On the Frozen Food Front:

Let’s face it – call it by whatever name you like: a grilled sandwich, a Panini, doesn’t matter – who can resist the allure of melted cheese, sumptuous meat and toasty, crisped bread, particularly for a lunch on the go? Nobody, it seems.

Stouffer’s, trying to capitalize on the enduring appeal of toasted sandwiches, has introduced two new product lines, containing 8 new dishes – Stouffer’s Corner Bistro Panini and Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine Panini. Early print media reviews are highly favorable. (See March 1st "Update," below, however...early Diner regular reviews are not good).

Each frozen box contains one sandwich. You open the box, place the open-faced sandwich on the top of the box and microwave it for about 3 minutes. Amazingly, Stouffer’s has created what they call a “revolutionary grill tray,” and it works, turning the bread crispy and melting the filling.

Each sandwich costs about $3.00 US. The Lean Cuisine versions have about 300 calories each with less than 10 grams of fat. The flavors are:

Corner Bistro: Grilled Chicken; Smoked Turkey Club; Philly-Style Steak and Cheese and Southwestern Chicken.

Lean Cuisine: Southwest Style Chicken; Chicken Spinach and Mushroom; Chicken Club and Steak and Mushroom.

I’m still trying to find these locally; in the meantime, if you’ve tried these and have any comments, you can comment here or post your own review at the Icebox Diner. C’mon, all you Panini Wahines….what do YOU think?

March 1: UPDATE: A Diner Regular recently contacted me and said she had "wasted" 320 calories on the Lean Cuisine Southwest Style Chicken Panini, which she ranked as "dreadful." She stated she wouldn't try one of these again. I currently have one of the Corner Bistro versions in my freezer; as soon as I've tried it, I'll update here again. Stay tuned!!

March 15: UPDATE: We've definitely had mixed reviews at the Diner about these sandwiches. I tried the Corner Bistro Smoked Turkey Club and hated it. Two other reviewers, however, tried the Southwest-Style Chicken Panini and each rated it Five Forks. I don't know if our taste buds are that different, or if I had heightened expectations from the Corner Bistro line, from which I have previously had great frozen dinners. Yes, the bread is crispy on the outside, but to me, the filling was seriously lacking in quality and taste. They are definitely not my cup of tea. For the calorie count, I think Stouffer's can do a lot better.