I was really craving Chipotle for lunch, but then I remembered that I had a Lean Cuisine Chicken Burrito Bowl in the freezer, which is kind of like wanting to see an Academy Award winning movie and then having to sit through fifteen hours of 90 Day Fiance instead.
(To be clear, 90 Day Fiance was my Oscars pick in every single category this year. I did not win the pool.)
Let’s dive in.
Taste: ⅗
Some things are just meant to go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Ray Donovan and Ray Donovan’s friend. Lean Cuisine and hunks of rubbery chicken.
But besides the hunks of a Archie McPhee-branded rubber chicken in here (which I think technically makes this vegan? @ PETA, please confirm?), this one’s pretty good! I mean, it’s rice, beans, chicken and cream sauce. It’s hard to screw those up. It may not win an episode of Chopped – unless they turn it into sorbet, the judges love stuff like that – but I’d eat it again.
Appearance: ⅕
It’s like a beautiful work of art…that was struck by lightning, ran through a meat grinder and stuffed into a dumpster behind Chili’s for a few months, before it was finally fished out, stuffed into a plastic bowl and frozen solid. That is to say, the Art Institute definitely has worse pieces inside (zing!) but I wouldn’t hang this above my sealed-off decorative fireplace.
Overall: ⅗
A solid Lean Cuisine! Plus, as part of the new “20% MORE BOWLS” line, you can enjoy even more of it – 20% more sodium! 20% more crunchy rice in the the middle that’s still frozen even though you microwaved it for like 14 minutes! 20% more time before you wander back into the kitchen looking for a “second lunch”! (Which in my case was a 3 month old rice krispy treat and a handful of slivered almonds. Dream big!)
Pairs Well With: A loose fistful of hot sauce and an endless YouTube hole of Game Show Fails. Can’t wait to one day tell my great-grandkids about these, the most fun days of my life. 🙂