This week, we’re doing a ChopBox review.

ChopBox asked us to try out one of their meals. We chose “Pecan-Crusted Chicken with Raspberry-Chipotle Sauce.” Here’s how things turned out:

Eating

Let’s start out by talking about what the finished dish tasted like.

In our book, “eating” is the most important part of any meal. 😉 The large, thick breasts were plump and juicy. The crust was tasty. The raspberry sauce complemented the chicken beautifully. It was jammier than we’d prefer and not as spicy as we’d’ve liked, but that’s more a statement about our reviewer’s tastes than a criticism of quality. The rice, chicken, crust, and sauce went together very nicely in terms of both taste and texture. The asparagus was simple, fresh, and delicious. The servings looked ample, but not obscene – yet when we were finished, we were quite full. And there were leftover asparagus and rice. (I roughly chopped the asparagus, mixed it with the rice, tossed in a pat of butter, and nuked it for lunch a few days later.)

This was a homey dish made with familiar ingredients.

Delicious, nonetheless. Better than what most of our friends have when they eat dinner at home. Not as sophisticated as something an accomplished home chef might make on a red-letter day, or as rarified as something you’d read about at Food52. We want to stress that it was very tasty. Its hominess was comforting. We’d assume it’d appeal to a wide swath of palates.

All the Stuff That Came Before the Eating

The meal came with less packaging than we expected.

There wasn’t a lot that had to be tossed, and what needed recycling was obvious and easy to deal with. It came in a really nifty bag, similar to a sturdy, reusable grocery bag, but with an internal layer of insulation. And you can zip it closed. It immediately took an honored place among my favorite grocery bags. (Chicago outlawed single-use grocery bags a while back, so most people now bring their own.) It also came with a few reusable freeze packs, but I have tons of that kind of stuff.

The cooking directions presented the easiest way to accomplish each of the tasks.

The chicken, for instance, could have been pounded flat and pan fried, but that requires more steps, dirties more utensils, takes more time, and requires more skill than simply baking it.

On the other hand, if you’re an accomplished cook, there’s nothing stopping you from doing all that pounding and pan-frying. It would be delicious and in fact, we believe that was what was done for the dish pictured on the directions card. (I found that a little odd.) In order to get really good color on the crust, I had to run the finished breasts under the broiler for a couple minutes. I did that, though, purely to photograph it for this post; I didn’t really think it was necessary otherwise. The important thing is, there’s some easy flexibility here if you have cooking skills.

ChopBox ingredients come already prepped.

So, the nuts for the chicken coating were already chopped. The rosemary leaves were already picked off the sprigs. The woody ends of the asparagus stalks had already been trimmed away. We thought this would mean that they’d be less fresh, but that was definitely not the case.

Pre-prepped ingredients meant that there was much less work for me to do, and that what work there was went quickly.

I cooked this by myself and plated it for my reviewers. I had it on the plates in less than 45 minutes, and that last third of that time was mostly passive waiting. There barely a handful of utensils that I needed to own, dirty up, and clean. It didn’t require a lot of effort or intense concentration, and I wasn’t exhausted afterward. I could easily pull this off after work on a weeknight. If you team-cooked this – which would be easy and fun – the amount of work would be downright trivial.

ChopBox

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! ChopBox sent us some free food and asked if we’d consider reviewing it, but aside from that, this is just like any of the other posts we dream up on my own.

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