Green Giant is the all too famous vegetable company we are grew up watching the commercials for on TV with the big green giant singing “ho, ho, ho, Green Giant!” The company has been around since 1903 and started out in Minnesota. He’s the friendly guy that tried to get us all excited about eating vegetables. We all know that we are supposed to meet our quota of vegetables each and every day. Sometimes, it can get time consuming finding the vegetables you like, preparing them, and matching them with a perfect meal. Green Giant has taken the guess work out of this task with perfect sized, sides of vegetables to go along with any meal. They are available in your grocer’s freezer section and usually go for less than $1.30 a box. I often can find them for $1.00 when they are on sale.
The most recent flavor I tried was Simply Steam, Seasoned, Garden Vegetable Medley. It contains sugar snap peas, roasted potatoes, red peppers, and a garden herb sauce. It cooks in 4 – 4 ½ minutes in your microwave. The vegetables in this selection are supposed to be perfectly steamed to perfection with the special bag they are contained in. When I first dumped the bag out onto a serving dish, there was an overwhelming amount of sugar snap peas. Some of them seemed a bit stringy and the ends of them were too tough to eat. I found that the red peppers seemed a bit mushy. There was not a huge amount of roasted potatoes in the bag, which more would have been nice. The garden herb sauce was nice, but overall, lacked a lot of flavor.
The nutritional value of this side dish is relatively healthy. Each box contains about 2 servings, which is about a half cup of veggies. Each serving is 50 calories, .5 grams of fat and 11 grams of fat. The Garden Vegetable Medley contains 20% of your daily value of Vitamin C, 4% of Iron, 2% of Calcium, and 8% Vitamin A.
On the whole, I would probably not buy this particular variety of steamed vegetables from Green Giant again. Although it sounded like it would be good, the vegetables were more of a disappointment than anything. The sauce was a nice addition, but could have been stronger or more flavorful. I think red peppers just do not turn out well being frozen and steamed again, unless you enjoy them being slightly mushy. The potatoes were the best feature in this side, unfortunately they were very sparse.
