Grilled Chicken Parmesan

One brand that I've discovered over the past year is evol (love backwards). It popped up a lot on Ibotta, a rebate app that we use when grocery shopping (if you want a referral, just let us know!), and it looked like it was worth a try. I've tried burritos, quesadillas, and various other frozen items, but none of them have ever made it to post yet! The most recent thing we ate was the grilled chicken parmesan.

This is one of evol's "meals for 2." It's pretty easy to make. No need to defrost. Just throw everything from the bag into a pan, turn on the heat, and cover the dish. Stir it every so often until everything's hot. Such a simple prepared meal. Their ingredients are also more natural and higher quality than some other frozen food brands that make prepared meals in a bag.

This meal overall was pretty good. The texture of the pasta and sauce gave no indication that it was frozen. The chicken you could tell wasn't cooked fresh, but it wasn't too bad. The melted cheese pulled the whole dish together and was another element that you couldn't tell came out of a frozen bag.

The only problem was that there wasn't a whole lot of food there. If you're looking for a light meal, this isn't a bad choice. But for a whole dinner for 2 people, it just wasn't very filling. I don't remember the exact number but it was maybe 300 calories each and filled one bowl. That just isn't enough for an entire dinner for us. Since we used the Ibotta rebate, I don't know how much these usually go for at the store, but I think they are around $6-7. 

While I know they have to charge more than other brands because of the better ingredients, it's not very cost-effective for us to get a pasta dish like this when we could just make it at home with a box of pasta, a jar of tomato sauce, some shredded cheese, and a can of chicken (if we're trying to make a quick convenient dinner) for less (and get more food). Sure, it would take longer than just throwing everything in a pan and heating it up, but not that much longer.

I really like most of the evol stuff I've tried and things like the burritos are pretty cheap for lunch (hopefully I'll get around to writing about those soon). But I don't think we're going to get that many of the meals for 2.