Review: Perdue Frozen Fully Cooked Chicken

We are a protein family around here. I can see easily the mood changes in Mister Man especially when he does and doesn't get protein. His focus and concentration and general ability to deal with life improve vastly when he eats protein. Breakfast must include protein, snacks always include protein, and I try to ensure dinner does, as well.

There are frequently nights where I've been running around all day and the wee ones have an activity where I don't have time to do more than make a quick peanut butter and jelly or chicken salad sandwich for them if I haven't been proactive and used the crock pot or lucky enough to have leftovers. While the wee ones would be fine eating peanut butter and jelly for dinner every night, I'm not so cool with that, especially if I happened to send that for lunch earlier in the day.

My other challenge is that I don't particularly want to feed the wee ones foods full of all sorts of additives and ingredients I can't pronounce. I don't generally do chicken nuggets and the like for that reason. So many of them have fillers and the meat ... doesn't really look like real chicken meat.

SheSpeaks sent me a coupon to try out Perdue's Fully Cooked Chicken, and I was happy to see that their chicken tenders (I tried the whole grain chicken tenders) are made with 100% white meat and use 100% all natural ingredients. There are 0 grams of transfats, which is also something that we avoid in our house. Oh, and did I mention that there are no preservatives and no fillers? This one meets (get the pun?) with my approval. I love that the whole grain tenders also have 4 grams of fiber, which we can always use.

My only concern was that the wee ones would not like the chicken tenders.

Fears are gone. The chicken breast tenders are pretty good, and the wee ones simply scarfed them down. In fact, they probably would have eaten more than the three tenders each I served them had I let them. I cooked the tenders in a mini silicone baking dish that SheSpeaks sent me to use, which really meant that I simply heated them, as they're already fully cooked. It took almost no time, which meant that I could have a meal I felt good about on the table and still get the wee ones to bed at a reasonable hour. Phew!

Since we did eat only a few of the chicken tenders, I was happy that the bag they came in was resealable - pretty much a stable now for most frozen foods, I think. In fact, given how easy it is to open and close, I won't be surprised if one day soon Mister Man decides to make his own snack of the Perdue Frozen Chicken without my help.

The biggest challenge I had, in fact, was purchasing the chicken. While my local Dominick's carries two flavors of the chicken (there are twenty-three altogether), their price on the page of fully cooked chicken was $9.99. The coupon is good for a maximum of $7.99. Once again, I was reminded why I don't often shop at Dominick's. I found an alternative store that carried the chicken for a more reasonable cost, and I purchased it there - interestingly, they also had more varieties available. There are definitely some other varieties that I'm interested in trying out - the Bourbon Chicken, for one!

In the interest of full disclosure, Perdue sent me a coupon for a free package of the Perdue frozen chicken and a mini silicone baking dish. I received no compensation, and all opinions expressed are my own.