March 20, 2019

Great Value Fit Menu Bourbon Steak - Wasn't

I'm still stuck in a hotel more than six months after Hurricane Florence, so I have a very limited cooking area and have to make do with just two burners and a microwave.  I buy a lot of the frozen chicken/pasta/vegetable meals you can make in a skillet, as well as individual frozen meals that I can microwave, but the carbs in the pasta meals kills me.  There isn't much variety with those limitations, so when I was at Walmart the other day and spotted Bourbon Steak in their Fit Menu line, I snatched it up.

I wish now that I hadn't.  Blech.

The price wasn't bad at $2.97, if it was something that was palatable.  This stunk.  Seriously.  I'm not sure who's definition of  'robust, satisfying meals' they used, but this one doesn't get my vote.

I'm not naive enough to think that any packaged meal is going to closely resemble the box it comes in, but this was worse than most.  The package shows a large helping of the beef in bourbon sauce next to a hefty serving of broccoli and red pepper, with mashed sweet potato on the side - all arranged neatly in one bowl/pan.  What was inside the box wasn't even close.

In reality, the meal was in a divided dish, with the beef in bourbon sauce on one side, and broccoli/red pepper and sweet potato on the other, and the broccoli was so small that the largest piece would have fit on my pinkie fingernail.  (I wish I had thought to take a photo of the meal when I opened it, but wasn't planning on writing a review at the time).  There was more red pepper than broccoli, and while I'm not a fan of red pepper anyway, a small amount is no big deal.  I had to pick this out and when I was done, it seemed almost half of my meal was gone.  The sweet potato wasn't too bad, but pretty bland, even after I salted it and added a large pat of butter.

The beef, however, was horrible.  There was more sauce than beef, and the latter was cut into very small pieces - small enough that it took three or four of them to equal what I consider a normal bite of food.  And the taste?  Ewwww.  I wasn't crazy about the fact that it had alcohol in it at all, but do know that alcohol used in cooking is pretty much burned off, so that being an ingredient wasn't a deal breaker when I purchased it.  After trying to choke it down, I wished that it had been.

I drained out a good amount of the sauce, and the beef was still drowning in it.  The meal is described as 'tender beef in a tangy bourbon sauce', but tangy isn't exactly the word I would have used.  I could definitely taste the alcohol and the sauce was very bitter, and I couldn't even taste the beef, even when spearing several pieces for one bite.  Yuck.  The bitter taste was still in my mouth for a good period of time after I'd finished eating.

All in all, I don't think the meal was even worth the $3 that I paid for it.  It still had 40g so wasn't exactly low carb (thanks to the sweet potato), and if the small pieces of beef included in my meal was supposed to account for the 24g of fiber listed, I think the cardboard box must have factored in there somewhere.

I'm going to be displaced for another couple of months, so will have to find more creative ways to fix a decent meal that's somewhat nutritious.  I won't be buying Great Value Fit Menu Bourbon Steak again.

~ Marie Anne





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