Day 5: Chicken Parmesan

Hello Microwave Maniacs,

My apologies for the delay in posting! I just got back home from a week in sunny, Huntington Beach, California. Apparently the hip thing in men's fashion there is to dress like you live in your car but i'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a little bit into it.

Travel aside, here's a fun fact about my family: We are approximately 0% Italian but we eat Chicken Parm for all major holidays / life events because it's delicious and everyone with taste buds enjoys it. It is a meal with three delicious ingredients AND THEN added pasta also covered in saucy, cheesy goodness. How can you go wrong? I decided to put Lean Cuisine to the test and see if they would ever run out of new ways to disappoint me in this week's first post!

Upon first glance I was taken aback - "There should be more cheese!" I exclaimed. But in all honesty it was probably a fair 310 calorie meal amount of cheese. After the second prep step most of the cheese was stuck to the plastic and I really just came to terms with the fact that it was not my day. The third prep step instructed me to stir the noodles before nuking the meal again. However, the noodles were frozen so "stirring" became more "aggressively cutting with a fork", rendering the pasta useless. It was not unlike the way people cut up food to give to babies. I could only really eat it by cutting up pieces of chicken and using it as a small snow plow to shovel carbs into my mouth.

I definitely burnt parts of the chicken patty. The burnt bits tasted like a chicken nugget from McDonald's so i'm bitter the rest of it doesn't taste like that but, oh well. It was a quality chicken patty. No mystery bits that I bit into and wondered "what the hell was that?!"  The sauce wasn't anything to write home about but it wasn't bad either. This is a very middle of the road dish, it's not my favorite by any means but if you're hungry and trying to lie to yourself about "comfort food" it wouldn't be a terrible choice. Alas, did it live up to the glory of regular chicken parm?  No, not a snowball's chance in hell.

Chicken Parmesan: 3 out of 5

- Colleen