I eat a lot of Healthy Choice frozen food. I am a terrible cook and I’m trying to lose weight, so their products appeal to me.

One of their more respectably tasty entrées is their “Chicken Margherita”, a nice little chicken and pasta dish. For years, it was served in the traditional small, flat box.

The packaging has recently been changed, however:

They have decided, for some reason, to make this a “Cafe Steamer” dish. This is problematic for several reasons.

The first is that it vastly increases the size of the packaging, to the point where I can’t fit more than one in my freezer at the same time. Why is this?

Because each individual package is now two very large, thick pieces of plastic: A bowl the sauce sits at the bottom of, and a steaming basket that sits above it with the pasta, chicken, and bits of tomato and garlic.

This leads me to my second problem with this change: Did anyone think of how much more waste this whole process produces? To go from one flimsy piece of plastic to two very strong ones a) cannot be cheap and b) is just a wee bit earth-unfriendly.

And frankly, it doesn’t really taste any different from the way it did when you just nuked the traditional flat package.

It does, however, lead me to the most amusing problem: Hilariously obvious instructions.

This is a picture of the directions on the back, which you can click to enlarge:

I direct your attention to the text in italics on the bottom right. If you can’t read it from the picture, it says:

Meal can also be enjoyed by placing steamed food on a plate and topping with sauce.

Wow! You mean I’m not legally obligated to use this giant plastic thing included in the packaging? I totally thought that’s what I was agreeing to by purchasing this Cafe Steamer.

Overall, it adds up to a needless, wasteful, and downright silly redesign of a product that was just fine the way it originally was.

Good News: I was able to drag myself to the gym today and did 35 minutes on the elliptical, which felt great.

Bad News: Then I came home and passed out for four hours, which felt much better.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll only pass out for 2-3 hours after working out…

Mark was in town this weekend, which was great fun. However, it led me to do the one thing I’ve tried to avoid doing at all costs while unemployed: I left the house.

This had two dire consequences. I am now a) broke and b) sick.

A) was expected and worth it. I do miss at least pretending I have a life, and it was nice to eat something other than another crappy frozen Healthy Choice dinner.

B), however, is proving more problematic. I initially blamed Mark and his Chicago-style germs, all covered in cheese and mustard.

But really, the problem is that I have had little human contact other than going to the gym for the last two months and my immune system was basically asleep in a dark corner of my pancreas when I needed it most.

Mark, his constitution hale and hearty from being tempered in the snows and bars of Chicago, was completely unaffected.

So now I’m left exhausted, coughing up a lung, with my nose running like a leaky faucet, but at least glad that I don’t have to work through this nonsense.

I shall provide further updates when the exhaustion lifts to the point that I can type more than 50 words a minute without feeling like I’ve run three miles.