Lean Cuisine: Asian-Style Potstickers
CoWorker Heidi submitted a meal I've always been curious about, but never brave enough to try. Potstickers are like egg rolls to me. Very hit or miss. So I'm hoping she'll bring some clarity so I can close the book on whether I want to pick this one up or not.
Looks good, also looks simple. I like that. A lot of the time it looks like they try to do too much and makes for an impossible to recreate meal. This looks pretty straight forward, rice, veggies, potstickers. Let's see how it turns out.
Interesting. Well I can see one problem I have with the meal, and that's the 'dipping' sauce. It's just in there with the meal;. Truth be told it's not a dipping sauce at all, it's just a sauce and it's getting in with the rice, meaning you have less to dip in. Bad move. But what did Heidi think?
It's not too bad. It could have had more sauce, though, which is odd since it is Lean Cuisine.
Looks like the dipping sauce should've been kept separate from the rice. And maybe they should have added a bit more. Like Heidi said, though, that's a really odd request to make of Lean Cuisine.
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Noodles & Company: Wisconsin Mac & Cheese with Chicken
Part 2 of Marissa's Macaroni and Cheese Odyssey. She went to a place I hadn't heard of before moving here but have come to think of it as a wonderful idea that should be in more regions...Like out west. Noodles & Company is an awesome concept for a take-out eatery where they have various kinds of noodles, sauces, and meats that you can mix and match into wonderful meals. Their big winner is the Wisconsin Mac and Cheese, made with all Wisconsin cheese. And that's what Marissa had, with chicken breast added on.
To look at what they advertise (this is pulled from their website) it looks like a pretty standard bowl of mac and cheese. Looks far better than what you'd find in a box or in the freezer, but doesn't really look too special. I'm rather surprised that this is the image they use to sell their product. Especially considering what the product looks like when you actually get it...
That looks ridiculously good. The colors aren't as rich, but that's a malfunction of my cell phone camera. The creamy sauce with the macaroni itself mixed with the cheese on top leaves a very nice-looking meal. You can tell just by looking at it. And, again, it surprises me how tame the website's picture is compared to the actual product. How's it taste?
Marissa said (and Christen piped in as well) that it's amazing. I would tend to agree as I've had the same meal. The chicken she says sets the meal off even better. She prefers the grilled chicken as opposed to the parmesean-crusted chicken because the crust on that gets a bit soggy. Lots of cheese and lots of deliciousness throughout this meal.
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Lean Cuisine: Macaroni & Cheese
Two days worth of Macaroni and Cheese are here. CoWorker Marissa went on a bit of a mac and cheese odyssey last week and checked in with two of the ways she had it. Today's is Lean Cuisine's version of Macaroni and Cheese.
It looks pretty good, I'm not going to lie. I love a creamy-looking mac and cheese and this certainly foots the bill. Macaroni and Cheese is one of the few dishes where you can't really give it too much sauce...Cause the sauce is cheese. So I say the more the merrier. Let's see the finished product.
That looks pretty good to me. And a good example of a meal that looks pretty close to the box! Give it a good stir and toss it into a white bowl and you're likely dead-on exactly what the packaging advertises. But how does it taste? Let's check with Marissa....
She says it was pretty bland, but she added some garlic salt and that made it all the better. She noted the sauce was creamy though, and that helped. So give it a little seasoning of your choice and you should be all set!
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Lean Cuisine: Classic Five Cheese Lasagna
Lasagna. People love lasagna, don't they? I love lasagna. But there's been some lasagna trauma here in the past. But it's with an open mind and an empty stomach (blatant Iron Chef ripoff there) that I went into this one. Cause I was hungry and lasagna sounded like it would hit the spot.
Look at that. Looks practically gourmet, doesn't it? And the ricotta in the middle looks awesome. I love ricotta cheese. It's so good and so unlike most other cheese. It doesn't look like a huge meal, but it looks like a tasty meal. I hope it's awesome.
I'm an idiot. I don't know why I let my guard down for things like this. This meal is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with Lean Cuisine meals about 85% of the time. The crazy amount of sauce is unbearable, the meal looks nothing at all advertised on the box (and couldn't be made to look like it no matter what you did), and the taste is so far off the mark that it's embarrassing. I keep thinking maybe we've gotten through the bad and have finally hit the promised land where everything will be good, but then they bring me back to reality. And the reality is Lean Cuisine makes terrible lasagna. It's not even really lasagna, it's two pasta sheets smothered in awful-tasting tomato sauce.
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Kashi: Sweet & Sour Chicken
Leave it to CoWorker Derek to keep us flush with healthy meals. Today he checks in with our second Kashi meal. I'm excited to see it because, as you might remember, the Kashi Mediterranean Pizza was one of the best things we've reviewed on the site. It was just wonderful. So let's take a look at what they can do with Sweet & Sour Chicken.
That looks like a pretty decent meal. And it looks in line with the thing Kashi does. Take VERY healthy foods and turn them into a meal. It's a nice alternative to what Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice choose to do, which is take regular foods and try to take out as much of the bad as possible to make it low calorie. It's an awesome way to go, but how's the actual meal?
Well, it doesn't look quite as appetizing on the box, but I like the little touches. For instance, the grill marks on the green beans is a nice touch. It looks saucier than it does on the box, and that's usually a bad sign. Let's check with Derek.
Derek said he enjoyed it and would definitely pick it up again. He likes Kashi granola bars and what not but this was his first time trying out their frozen meals and while it didn't quite match the box, he was impressed.
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Marie Callender’s: Penne Chicken piccata
CoWorker Derek is back with another brand we've not ventured into on the site. Marie Callender's is a restaurant chain elsewhere, however here in the Midwest it seems relegated to frozen foods, which is a shame. The potato soup they have is top notch. I've had one of their frozen meals before, a pot pie, and it was only so-so. I'm interested in how their pasta works out. Looks pretty good...
Looks like a pretty good bowl of pasta, but it doesn't look overly fancy. I like where they are going with that. Lean Cuisine tries to overdo their boxes leading to the it being impossible to recreate the image with the actual food. Let's see how it turns out...
Outside of the Parmesan cheese and the little bit of garnish on top, this is pretty true to the picture. Toss it a bit more and it'll look spot-on. But how did it taste? Derek wasn't impressed...
Derek thought it looked and smelled great, but the noodles tasted bad and has the texture of rubber. Not a good start. The chicken was the best part, but the sauce was too gooey. It seems the meal stayed with him, too, as he felt kinda' bad for the rest of the day. It just left a bad taste in his mouth and he doesn't recommend it to anybody.
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