Archive for the ‘Lean Cuisine’ Category

Lean Cuisine Linguine Carbonara

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Lean Cuisine Linguine Carbonara - Ad

Lean Cuisine Linguine Carbonara

“Hey boss – I’m packing up these Carbonaras, but we’re low on peas and bacon. Should I order more?” “Nah, just give ’em four peas and two little bacon scraps. They’ll never notice.”

I’ve made carbonara myself from scratch; I’ve had it in Italian restaurants; I’ve even eaten it in Italy, where they tend to make pretty decent Italian food. While this (unsurprisingly) doesn’t come close to any of those three experiences, it’s a passable approximation for a frozen box that cooks in three minutes. The sauce has the trademark eggy/cheesy taste of a carbonara sauce, but it’s way too loose. The noodles are too soft too, making this more of a carbonara soup than the thick pile of cheesy pasta that it’s supposed to be.

Looks: 2.5 out of 5 Taste: 3 out of 5

Lean Cuisine Pasta Romano with Bacon

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

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Lean Cuisinse Pasta Romano with Bacon - Ad-2

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

Lean Cuisine Chicken in Peanut Sauce

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

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Lean Cuisine Chicken in Peanut Sauce

Looks: The only difference from box to bowl is that the sauce is thicker in real life, and this gives the entire dish less of a “shiny” appearance and more of a “mucky” appearance, to use a technical term. 4.5 out of 5

Taste: Have you ever made a bowl of chicken, noodles, and vegetables, and then just for the heck of it, mixed in a few tablespoons of peanut butter? No? Because that would taste weird? Yeah, it would taste weird, wouldn’t it. If this meal came without the peanut sauce, it would probably rate a 3.5, but the thick peanut sauce was just too much like peanut butter. 2 out of 5

Lean Cuisine Baja-Style Chicken Quesadilla

Monday, March 1st, 2010

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Lean Cuisine Baja-Style Chicken Quesadilla

Looks: I don’t know what kind of cutting and dividing they did for the box picture, but there’s only one quesadilla in the box. Its filling is pretty close to what you see on the package, but the cheese kind of overwhelms the other stuff as it melts, much like a volcano taking out Los Angeles with its lava. (Side note: the cheese filling is like lava in another way, in that it will melt your mouth if you eat it too soon after heating.) 4 out of 5

Taste: They should really call this a corn quesadilla, because all you taste is corn and cheese. It was still ok, but I wouldn’t have known there was chicken in it if I hadn’t seen it on the box. So if you like corn and you like cheese, you’ll love this meal. (If you don’t like corn or cheese, why did you buy a quesadilla that clearly contains both? Weirdo.) 3 out of 5