Voila! Make Dinner Simple

It's true there are Sunday afternoons in which I'll happily put on my apron, heat up the kitchen with a hot oven, and spend hours and hours seeing how many dishes I can dirty just to make the husband some fancy dessert (e.g., cannoli) or a nice loaf of homemade beer bread. But I don't always want to spend a lot of time on dinner, especially if I've been out of the house all day. I love rice that'll cook itself in the steamer while I prep and bake chicken, and I'll always be a huge fan of frozen vegetables that are already cut up and ready to be cooked on the stovetop.

Seriously, can dinner get any easier than that?

Oh, yes, it can. 

If you've ever strolled down the frozen food section of your local grocery store you've seen those prepackaged dinners that, literally, contain everything you need for a meal. This is an aisle the husband and I rarely shop from. Why? I never thought I had any use for those packaged meals. But I have a confession: I was so wrong.

Usually it's the husband who works to get me to utter those words. But this time it was the lovely people at Foodbuzz and Birds Eye Voila frozen entrees who got me to admit I'd been mistaken.

A member of the Tastemaker Program, I was one of the lucky ones who received 100 coupons toward frozen entrees from Birds Eye. The time for me to hit up that frozen food aisle had come. We bought a bag of the sweet and sour chicken Saturday afternoon and threw it in the freezer, thinking we'd eat it one night during the week when neither of us felt like cooking.

Then Sunday rolled around and, unlike other weekends when I want to spend most of the day in the kitchen, all I wanted to do was play pool. The husband and I spent the afternoon out and about and finally returned home just about in time for dinner.

But we didn't feel like cooking. Lucky for us, there was something just perfect in the freezer: that sweet and sour chicken dinner.


The husband and I cooked dinner on the stovetop in no time at all and it was good - so good, in fact, that I completely forgot to take a photo. (My bad!) Sometimes I'm leery about chicken in prepackaged foods like that, but I could find no complaints with the chicken. The only thing we could complain about - very little - was that we maybe could have used more vegetables. Or maybe I should have served a salad, too. The husband and I ate all three servings between us. 

So, there you have it. I was wrong. Sometimes dinner can be even simpler than steaming rice, baking chicken and cooking frozen vegetables. And sometimes, just sometimes, it's OK to spend an entire Sunday afternoon losing to your husband in pool. If you've got a Birds Eye Voila! entree waiting for you in the freezer you're golden.

Please note this post is part of a Foodbuzz Tastemaker program with Birds Eye Voila! I was sent a large envelope of coupons toward these frozen entrees so I could share my honest opinion with you. And if you're interested in any of those coupons, please let me know!