Looks: The image on the packaging conveniently omits all of the hat-shaped onion end-pieces which seemed to comprise my entire box, but the color and texture are appropriately represented. 4 out of 5

Taste: The onion is sweet, the breading is crunchy, and they taste great dipped in ketchup, catsup, or Generic Tomato-Based Dipping Sauce. To more adequately describe these rings, allow me to draw upon personal experience: in my life, I have encountered three types of onion rings:

1. “Onion” rings, which are essentially deep-fried breading with the faintest bit of onion inside – these are what Burger King sells.
2. Onion “rings”, which are more onion than anything else, with not enough breading to adequately cover and give structure to the onion. These are found at 2nd-tier concession stands and poorly-run restaurants.
3. “Onion rings” – healthy slices of white onion with healthy amounts of breading. Both components have their own flavors, and both textures are detectable in your mouth.

These rings are definitely a variant of #3. They have enough breading to make you feel bad about yourself for eating the entire box, but enough onion to make you feel good about yourself for eating an entire vegetable. 4 out of 5

Ah, lunchtime. Those thirty magical minutes when you can forget about the troubles of your job, the upcoming credit card bills, and your soul-crushing loneliness. All food brings comfort, but there’s nothing in the world that will lift your spirit like a bowl full of vegetables. Yes sirree, with their fresh taste unlocked by the magic of steam, this meal of “Grilled (but actually steamed) Mediterranean (but also found in America) Vegetables” is just what you need to turn that frown upside-down. (Note: Upside-down frown may not be experienced by all customers.)

The best part of this meal is the obvious lack of meat. You won’t have to waste time on tender marinated chicken or juicy slow-cooked beef just to get to the delicious vegetable side dishes, like in most meals. When you open this box, you’ll feel like you died and went to heaven… vegetable heaven, that is! The broccoli tastes like broccoli. The eggplant tastes like eggplant. And the snozzberries — don’t get me started on the snozzberries!

Who cares if you’ve been taking cold showers for a week because you’re late on the gas bill? So what if your wife left you and took your dog with her? You’ve still managed to keep the lights on, and that’s worth a reward. So set your microwave for two and a half minutes, and let your cares drift away – you’ve got some eating to do.

Looks: 5 out of 5 Taste: 3 out of 5

Reader Rose Marshall provided this review of tiny little burgers from some place called “Jack in the Box,” which, being from Minnesota, I have never heard of.

Looks: Basically looked “mini” and sirlion-y…but in the thrown together way that all fast food looks. The burgers were thick and not too dry. The biggest discrepancy was the buns, they would have looked like the photo, except they were burnt….like BLACK burnt. I guess my Mom taught me to eat burnt food, so I didn’t really mind. 3.5 out of 5

Taste: Tasted pretty good, actually tasted like real food. Which, in some messed up way disappointed me, because I expect a fast food burger to be a super-greasy delicious sin. But, it was not as sinful as some, meat was thick and meaty. I would eat it again. The cooked onions were a nice touch, different that the standard toppings. 4 out of 5

I don’t know about you, but that last picture is the most appetizing thing I’ve seen all week.

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

Dena’s potstickers:

My potstickers:

Looks: Not as vibrant or as fresh as the box depicts, but much moreso than Dena’s. The portion sizes are accurate though. 3.5 out of 5

Taste: The potstickers were chewy (the way I like them), but the filling was mostly tasteless – tofu is not known for its flavor. On the other hand, the rice surrounding the potstickers was terrible; gritty and dry, completely unpalatable. I’d eat the potstickers again if I was able to get them for free, but I’d still throw the rice away. 2 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: The wrap in the ad is beefy, the tortilla filled to the point of bursting. The wrap in real life looks like a scared little hamburger turtle, just barely poking its head out of its shell. No lettuce or onions to speak of – just beef and cheese.

If you were to open up the wrap, you’d see this work of art:

I’m getting hungry just looking at this picture, aren’t you? Not even half a beef patty, and even fewer toppings than are visible poking out of the end of the wrap in the ad. 2 out of 5

Taste: It tastes… very much like a Big Mac. Well, until the third bite, when you’ve used up all the special sauce and cheese, and you’re left with three more bites of dry beef and tortilla. I would have given the first bite a four, but the last bite was more like a 1 – I guess I’ll have to go with the average. 2.5 out of 5

Looks: This one does ok, with a few caveats: the beef/noodles ratio depicted on the box is backwards (the noodles by far outnumber of beef strips), the big chunks of zucchini pictured are missing, and the dessert consists more of gingersnap topping than peaches. On the plus side, look at those vegetables! Vibrant colors that match the advertisement. 3.5 out of 5

Taste: The vegetables ended up being the high point again: fresh-tasting with a good bite. I had never had edamame (baby soy beans) before, and I liked their clean green taste. In other news, the dessert triangle was overly sweet, with too much crumbled topping, and while the beef/noodle combination started out well enough with ok noodles, the beef was stringy and the sauce was quite gritty and not pleasant-tasting at all. 2 out of 5