P.F. Chang's Frozen Meals

I normally don't buy pre-made frozen meals. I can make my own cheaper and I'm usually all about saving a buck. We're in a unique situation for the next several months though...It's just the girls and I and we are working with a kitchenette (two burner stove, microwave/convection oven and regular pots and pans). I'm not interested in cooking an involved meal the girls won't eat, I don't have access to my stash of freezer meals, but I want real, grown-up food. When I was at the grocery store to stock up on supplies, I saw these new P.F. Chang's frozen meals. I love the food at the P.F. Chang's restaurants (if you go, you have to try the Great Wall of Chocolate for dessert--share with a friend and you'll still have leftovers. For my friends who need gluten free, they even have an entire gluten free menu you can ask for and order from), so I was excited to see something I could easily make at the hotel here. Even better, one of the varieties was beef with broccoli, which I never see in frozen meals, but is my favorite asian meal. The bag said it made two meals and it was selling for $7.50, so I went ahead and got it.

A few days ago, I tried it for the first time. I was very pleasantly surprised at how good it was! It didn't taste like a frozen meal, it tasted like something I would get at the restaurant. The first good thing was that the way everything is packaged in the bag, I had no trouble just cooking part of the bag and keeping the rest in the freezer for later. I was worried I was going to have to cook the whole thing and eat it two or three days in a row. The sauce is frozen in little bricks instead of already being on the vegetables and meat though, so it was easy to just take out what I needed without cooking the rest. The other benefit to that is it's possible to reduce the sodium content if needed. The Beef with Broccoli in particular is pretty heavy on sodium. One of my closest friends has a son with Duchenne MD and needs to watch his sodium intake, so she was worried about that, but it'd be easy to just not put all of the sauce cubes in. The other nice surprise was that when I paired it with rice, there was no way I could eat half a bag by myself. I ate about 1/4 of the bag, but if my stomach wasn't currently being squished down to the size of a walnut by the baby, I could probably eat 1/3 of the bag.

Yesterday, I was at Target and they had these meals too, but had different varieties stocked, plus they were on sale for $7.00. So I picked up another one...sweet and sour chicken this time. Much less sodium in this one, obviously, since it's not a soy sauce based sauce. It's packaged the same way though, the sauce is frozen in cubes and it was easy to only cook what I needed to cook. Equally tasty!

There is almost no effort involved in cooking these. Everything is already in the bag, you just dump it in a skillet, cover and cook about 12 minutes, stirring occasionally. It's been so easy for me to throw it on the stove and continue on with making the girls grilled cheese or ham and cheese sandwiches. I've been making up a bowl of rice in the microwave at the same time, and dinner's on the table in 15 minutes.

I wasn't compensated in any way, shape or form for this review. P.F. Chang's has no clue I exist, I was just so impressed with how tasty and easy these were that I had to post about them!