Looks: The sauce doesn’t have the texture that’s depicted on the box – it’s closer to Ragu than Prego, if you know what I mean – and the lasagna didn’t quite keep its structure after being cut, even though I let it stand for the recommended 10 minutes after removing it from the oven. 4 out of 5

Taste: This lasagna tasted amazing for being boxed and covered with a thin plastic sheet, and it took literally no culinary ability to prepare, so even my wife could make it! I love my wife. The only change I would make to it would be to remove one of the five cheeses. Four is plenty, and by the end of my seventh piece, I was starting to feel a little logy. 4.5 out of 5

Today’s review comes from reader Megan W. of Lawrence, Kansas:

Looks: The actual pizza appeared to have more, and larger, pieces of vegetables than are shown on the box. The crust didn’t brown much at all. The sauce is as startlingly orange as it appears on the box. The vegetables had actual grill marks exactly as shown. When I first unwrapped the pizza some of the vegetables had migrated to one side so I arranged them to be more even across the pizza.4 out of 5

Taste: This was a delicious pizza. The crust very good: just salty enough with a nice mix of crisp and chewy. The sauce, although orange, was tasty and had noticeable tomato flavor. The vegetables were plentiful, not too soft, and actually tasted grilled (apparently the grill-marks weren’t just for appearances). Although the pizza was flavorful, it was a bit under-seasoned. It could have benefited from some Italian herbs and/or pepper. 4.5 out of 5

My only comment is that it appears that Kashi forgot to add the cheese. Even more embarrassingly, they forgot to add the cheese to the pizza they photographed for the box. Crazy!

Looks: Except for the absence of melted cheese (which most likely melted into the sauce as it cooked), Lean Cuisine accurately portrayed this meal. Probably because it doesn’t look disgusting in real life, so there’s no reason to fake it. 4.5 out of 5

Taste: Nothing special, but nothing terrible. In the grand scheme of pasta, there are five levels of taste:

1. Michelina’s
2. Chef Boyardee
3. Dry pasta with canned sauce
4. Homemade pasta with homemade sauce
5. Homemade pasta with homemade sauce in Italy

This meals comes in somewhere around #3. The slight bacon taste gives it a little edge over your generic jarred spaghetti sauce, but I might not have noticed that there was bacon in this if I hadn’t already known it. 3 out of 5

Looks: Looks like a big tub o’ goo, as if the spaghetti in the picture was stepped on by a wet boot. 2 out of 5

Taste: Looks are deceiving in this case; it’s actually very tasty. Most microwave spaghetti tends to become either over-dry and crunchy or overcooked and mushy. However, this pasta was neither too dry nor too soft, and the sauce tasted fresher than it should be allowed. 4 out of 5

Looks: They didn’t add enough cheese for it to melt all the way to the edges, the tomato sauce more closely resembles a thin sheet of red paint, and the green peppers by far outnumber the chicken bits. (It’s called “Chicken with Peppers”, not “Peppers with Chicken.”) 3.5 out of 5

Taste: The crust is chewy right out of the microwave, but it becomes crackery if you let it cool. The chicken, cheese, and sauce were all passable (on the high end for microwave pizza), but I definitely would have appreciated more of them. (Although then I suppose they’d have trouble calling it a “200 calorie portion.”

One word of warning: don’t take the “recommended cooking instructions” at face value. There are two 200-calorie portions in each box, and for the first one, I cooked it exactly how long the box recommended I cook it based on my microwave’s wattage (2 minutes). For the second portion, I left it in the microwave for only 1:20. Can you guess which is which?

So if you cook it under close supervision and stop the microwave when the cheese melts, you’ll be ok. 3.5 out of 5

Looks: Instead of a thick juicy tomato sauce, I see a dry brown bowl of noodles and meat. 3 out of 5

Taste: Bland. The sausage coins were ok, but everything else was just bleh – gritty meatballs, lackluster sauce, overcooked noodles. 2 out of 5

Looks: When you take into account the fact that I didn’t properly plate this meal, it’s very well depicted on the packaging. (There’s a second chicken patty underneath the sauce.) 4 out of 5

Taste: Much better than I expected – I expected soggy chicken and tasteless lasagna, but the chicken was firm and juicy, and the lasagna’s ricotta filling was very apparent. The lasagna noodles weren’t overcooked on the edges either. This is one of the few microwave lasagna meals I’ve tried that I would buy again. 4 out of 5

Looks: Like most frozen pizzas, this pizza isn’t cheesed adequately enough to ever have melty cheese string from piece to piece. Apart from that, the shape and color are appropriately depicted on the box. 4 out of 5

Taste: I present to you two facts:

1. This pizza is “Tony’s Crispy Crust Pizza.”
2. I’ve never eaten a less crispy pizza in my life.

It was very bready, and very chewy. If I ignore the fact that it was supposed to be crispy, it wasn’t too bad for a $1 grocery store pizza, but I have to score it low though due to the missing advertised crispiness. 2 out of 5

Looks: I still can’t get these pizzas to brown properly, even after following different advice I’ve gotten from readers: “Move it under the broiler”; “don’t preheat the oven”; “use a blow-torch.” None of it works. 4 out of 5

Taste: There is a definite quality scale of frozen pizzas: it starts with your Lunchables mini pizzas (ketchup and bread), then you have your Jack’s/Jeno’s/Totino’s, then up on the high end, you have your Digiorno’s and Freschettas – the “pizzeria-style” pizzas (if you believe their commercials). I would place this Red Baron above Digiorno, but below Freschetta. The cheese is thick, the sauce is zesty, and the crust is nice and chewy, but not as nice as Freschetta’s. This pizza has a good collection of herbs mixed in the cheese as well, and I think that is what really sets it apart from the Jack’s and Jeno’s. 4 out of 5

Looks: The noodles are right, but the sauce is all wrong. Instead of being a thick and hearty tomato sauce with chunks of beef, it consists of some dried-up pieces of meat and a scant amount of liquid. It really makes the difference in how edible the dish looks, wouldn’t you agree? 2 out of 5

Taste: The taste mirrors the looks: the noodles are ok, but the sauce is just meh. The different parts of the sauce never seemed to coalesce, but rather just separated into tomato and beef and liquid. Not only did the sauce not form one mixture, but the different parts of the sauce didn’t stick to the pasta, further separating the dish into “noodles and tomato and beef and liquid” instead of Rigatoni Bolognese. 2 out of 5