Being the not so great cook that I am, I love finding things that are good and fast! Unfortunately they are not that easy to find. The grocery store next to us is converting from a Food Lion to a Bottom Dollar (they are owned by the same company and carry most of the same products but their prices are different! how weird is that?) With the transformation comes a lot of “last chance” sales, limited stock, and quick clean outs of some items. I’ve been taking advantage of that as much as I can and watching for drastic price cuts on items.

One night last week while on my bargain hunt in the freezer section I found these Chicken Voila! on sale. I looked at the bag, and it was easy to tell that to feed everyone I’d need at least two bags. It was so cheap with the markdown that I figured it was worth a try, and it had the chicken already in the bag, which was good because the meat department was torn down and there was nothing to buy over there. So, two bags went into the cart and I headed for the checkout.

The easy to make directions;

1. Place Contents of bag in a large skillet with 1/4 cup of water
2. Heat to a simmer over HIGH heat. Stir, reduce heat to MEDIUM and cover
3. Cook 7 to 9 minutes or until heated through, stirring frequently
4. Stir and serve

I used my dutch oven pot since I was making two bags instead of just one. It worked well enough and gave me enough room to stir without making a mess all over the stove.

Normally with things like this the timing is all wrong and it takes longer than it really says on the package. That was not the case this time, and it was really done and ready to serve in less than 10 minutes. At this point I was pretty impressed with the product, it looked pretty good, and the kitchen smelled nice and garlic-y!

Which brought us to the table of course. I know this isn’t a regular recipe, basically just food in a bag, add water, stir. But, I gave it our usual family rating scale anyhow. Remember, Lucas doesn’t eat noodles because he’s got a crazy gag reflex. Although he did snag a piece of chicken off my plate and liked it!

Overall, for dinner in a bag it wasn’t bad. Not something I would purchase on a regular basis because it is a little bit on the pricey side for us. Now, if you’re single and just making one bag for yourself, this would be a good deal because not only would you get dinner, but you’d surely have leftovers to pack in your bento for lunch! (see how I snuck the bento in there?) And possibly even for a family of 2 or 3 this would still work out okay, but there probably wouldn’t be any leftovers, and I like to have a little bit of leftovers.

The veggies were really good, and the carrots weren’t mushy they were crisp but cooked ~ just the way I like them. There was an average amount of chicken in the packages. I was fairly impressed by that, I wasn’t expecting much to be in there at all. It wasn’t a very filling dinner at all and we ended up having snacks and smoothies just a few hours later out on the patio. Adding a side salad might have helped in that area, or some biscuits or something. For a light summertime dinner where you don’t want to make the kitchen all hot and yucky, but you don’t want to eat burgers and hot dogs on the grill, it was okay.

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