Lean Cuisine Review #4: Apple Cranberry Chicken

Grilled chicken in an apple reduction with cranberries, french cut green beans and whole wheat pilaf


We return again to the Lean Cuisine Spa for their Apple Cranberry Chicken. After exploring some of the other locations on the map of the mighty LC, I'm thinking this spa might be the go-to place for the good stuff, as the ACC was one of the best LC's I've had so far.

Maybe I just like too many vegetables, but I find a lot of these meals are lacking in veggies. Come on, LC, I'm trying to get healthy here! What's cheaper and more filling than vegetables? Well, whole wheat pilaf is. Except the folks at Lean Cuisine obviously think that my hunger pains somehow cloud my ability to think, because ol' Brad knows that pilaf is dish primarily consisting of rice, not the rice-shaped orzo pasta which I found here. I can hear them now - "Oh, the fatties will never know. They're too busy stuffing their face with a combination of sugar, trans fat, and sadness." Well, this guy found out your scheme, and he's about to blow this racket WIDE OPEN, bitches.

It was nice to see the pearl wheat mixed in with the noodle-which-definitely-weren't-pilaf - it gave them a bit of chew, and the texture difference allowed to savor each bite rather than simply swallowing a load of soggy noodles.

Cranberries freeze very well, so the ones found in my dinner were just as good as you would find anywhere else, and their tartness was helping the dish tickle the taste buds in several different directions. This only got better when you combined it with the "apple reduction" which honestly tasted like the gel stuff you would get on the "apple cobbler" of the old-school TV dinners, but when used in moderation, there was a definite apple-flavored sweetness that got the job done.


Chicken is a LC staple protein, and I've found the quality of the chicken bites varies from dish to dish. The chicken breast in this meal, however, was some of the best I've had in a TV dinner. And when you combine that with the rest of the dish, you have a series of flavors going in several different directions, and it makes you almost forget that you're eating a stupid diet frozen meal. The stark, black tray that stares you in the face after eating it all snaps you back to reality.

Rating: Four out of Four sad-faced Brads. The person, not the tiny nail which is also called a "brad".