Food In Real Life

Bertolli Shrimp Scampi and Linguine

Looks: In my experience, Bertolli’s Skillet Meals are always represented quite accurately on the packaging, and the Shrimp Scampi is no exception. While the shrimp don’t quite have the color or heft of the shrimp on the package, and the peppers are overrepresented on the box by about 25%, the overall texture, color, and amount of the food is very close. 4.5 out of 5

Taste: Every time I have one of Bertolli’s Skillet Meals, I am very impressed by the quality. It’s essentially a flash-frozen bag of all the ingredients that you just heat it up in a skillet until the sauce melts, so finding out that the pasta has the right amount of bite and the sauce actually tastes good was quite a surprise. In the Shrimp Scampi, the pasta was perfect, the shrimp weren’t rubbery like frozen shrimp can tend to be, but the peppers were a little bit soggy. 4.5 out of 5

Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli

Looks: Once you’ve shaken them out of the can and swirled them around a bit, the ravioli do have the same basic shape as depicted on the wrapper, and the sauce is almost the right color. However, the meat inside is not a healthy brown, but rather a sickly gray. (The pasta too is miscolored – more a pasty white than a golden yellow.) Additionally, the sauce doesn’t coat the ravioli like it’s supposed to, and the pasta pieces are more like flared-out boxes of meat than fluffy little beef pillows. 2.5 out of 5

Taste: There isn’t much. The sauce is really the only thing with a flavor, so it’s a good thing it’s decent for having come out of a can that may have been on the shelf for years. The “pasta” is so soft that you can chew the whole meal with just your tongue and the roof of your mouth, so add another point to the score if you’re suffering from lockjaw. 1 out of 5

Kellogg’s Special K Bar

Looks: It’s pretty close to the packaging. A few things are off: the color is a bit dark, the chocolate drizzle isn’t as uniform as advertised, and the bar’s edges are kind of rounded off. Over all though, it’s ok. 4.5 out of 5

Taste: First, I have to say, this bar is small. It’s only four inches long, and weighs in at 0.8 oz. (It’s so light that you might actually weigh less after eating it.) That put aside, it tastes surprisingly good for 90 calories. It’s chewy, with a nice, almost caramel-y flavor (although there’s no caramel in the bar), and the scent of the chocolate wafts nicely up to your nose even before you start eating it. It’s good for about four bites, so if you’re looking to get filled up, you’d be better off with a banana or an apple, but for a low-calorie sweet treat, it does the job. 4 out of 5

DiGiorno Stuffed Crust Five Cheese Pizza

Looks: The cheese didn’t melt as evenly as depicted, probably because there was far more cheddar in the mix than depicted on the box. Additionally, the outer rim of half the pizza swelled way up, making the crust appear to be 4 inches wide in spots. The cheese inside the crust was not as obvious as on the package, and there were a lot of stray sauce spots peeking through where cheese was missing. 3 out of 5

Taste: Meh. It tastes like any any frozen pizza, until you get to the crust, where you’re suddenly put off by the overpowering greasiness and bitterness of the cheddar cheese mixture (think Cheez Whiz) they inexplicably used to stuff the crust instead of mozzerella. I wouldn’t buy it again. 2 out of 5