I’m as big a gravy fan as the next person, but not when I’m expecting fluffy rice and chunks of chicken and lots of peas, carrots and corn (well the lots of peas was right, which I could have done without since I’m not big on peas, but anyway, at least I knew to expect them). I know the package photos always exaggerate what’s inside, but this was ridiculous!

Instead of getting what I thought would be mostly rice with an ample serving of chicken and vegetables in a gravy sauce (not swimming in gravy, just a gravy sauce) what I got was a sloppy gravy-pea soup with only 3 kernels of corn and a few soggy carrot cubes, and the chicken was so salty and greasy, I couldn’t eat more than a few bites. And I would say that it was about 25% rice to 75% gravy. I had to hunt to even find enough rice to fill my spoon. Needless to say I was very disappointed in this particular variety of Hormel dinner.

I thought I would like this because I liked the turkey and dressing dinner from Hormel … it had a lot of gravy too when I first opened it up, but the slices of turkey and the cubes of dressing underneath were hearty enough that they soaked up the gravy once I mixed it around a little bit and was actually a decent meal … not Mom’s home cooking by no means but not bad for a shelf-stable 90 second microwave meal. And I really liked the dressing. The meat was a bit salty, much like the meat in the chicken and rice dinner, but at least it was edible.

I ended up fishing out the few pieces of corn I could find, the three spoonfuls of rice I could rescue from drowning in the gravy, the few cubes of carrots that didn’t dissolve when I touched them, and the few bites of chicken I could muster, then gave the rest to my cat. And then I felt guilty for feeding it to my cat … I think he liked the gravy, yet there was still something missing even for him.

I won’t be buying this variety again. I’m just glad I ate it at home where I had other things to eat for dinner instead of taking this for my lunch at work and then not having anything else to eat.

It scared me because it has chicken yet you don’t need to refrigerate it, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The package has a picture of some nice yellow rice with little pieces of chicken and vegetables. When I took it out of the microwave, it was this soupy brown disgusting looking stuff-nothing like the picture! It tasted ok at first but it was so salty that I couldn’t finish it!