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Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly. ~Robert Lewis Stevenson

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Frontera Sausage and Roasted Pepper Pizza

December 18, 2007 | Reviewer: Abi

Price: $4.29 on sale
Serving: 1/3 Pizza, 5.3oz.
Calories: 300 per serving
Fat: 13%, 9g
Cholesterol: 6%, 20mg
Sodium: 24%, 580mg
Protein: 15g
Carbohydrates: 11%, 34g
Fiber: 9%, 2g
Weight Watchers Points: 6 Points

Frontera says: I lived above a pizza joint once — in Oaxaca, Mexico. Every evening, the aroma of yeasty golden crusts mingled with tomato…and chiles and cilantro. It was pizza for sure, but pizza with a delicious Mexican spirit. Back in the States, my homemade pizza sauce started tasting a little like salsa. Toppings explored New World territories. The crust had the satisfying crispness of a traditional stone-fired oven. And a new pizza was born — Frontera Pizza.

Chef Rick Bayless

Abi says: I’ve seen Chef Rick Bayless’s books at Target, flipped through them, and thought to myself ‘Mmmmm, that looks like a tasty recipe for grilled salmon and avocado salad.’ It was this memory, combined with the bright, enticingly designed pizza box that led me to make a drastic dinnertime mistake.

Mr. Bayless may be a nice guy and he might look eerily like one of my grad school profs, and he might even be a terrific chef when it comes to fresh, seasonal, authentic Mexican food. But all of these qualifications are for naught when it comes to frozen pizzas.

Frontera’s Sausage and Roasted Pepper Pizza features chicken chorizo sausage, red onion and roasted peppers. This combination of ingredients should be a homerun in my partially-Mexican household. I am a person that wants taco trucks at her wedding (I’ll explain some other time), so wouldn’t I adore a product inspired by authentic Mexican pizza (whatever that means)? Instead of adoration, I’ve got a whole lot of confusion. The sausage is slightly spicy, but features none of the kick I expect from real Mexican chorizo. Additionally, the sausage in unevenly distributed across the pizza, leading to some slices that feature only the even more disappointing grayish (formerly red) onions, green peppers and waxy white cheese.

George and I ate a few slices of the pizza, but focused mostly on our side salads, delicious creations that involved fresh red onion, avocado and Oscar Mayer Ready to Eat Bacon. Usually, George devours the several leftover slices of pizza later in the night as a snack or during the next day as a between-breakfast-and-lunch snack. Instead, we both stared at the leftover pizza for a few seconds and agreed that it wasn’t worth saving for later.

I need to stop buying pizza at Whole Foods. It is either expensive (even when on sale) or disappointing (worst crusts) or both (paying a lot for bad crust). This pizza was the unstar of last night’s dinner. It was monochromatic, bland, and no match whatsoever for a simple salad.

Tombstone Light Vegetable Pizza

December 17, 2007 | Reviewer: Andrew

Price: $3.00 on sale
Serving: 1/5 Pizza, 4.6oz.
Calories: 230 per serving
Fat: 9%, 6g
Cholesterol: 3%, 10mg
Sodium: 21%, 510mg
Protein: 13g
Carbohydrates: 10%, 31g
Fiber: 16%, 4g
Weight Watchers Points: 4 Points

Tombstone says: Nothing, really, but it makes a point of pointing out that this pizza has half the fat of other meatless frozen pizzas. And apparently it’s a good source of calcium (20% DV, not shabby).

Andrew says: The only pizzas this site has reviewed before, I believe, are Kashi pizzas and Amy’s Kitchen pizzas, so rather than shock the system with some cheese bomb pizza, I thought I’d give Tombstone’s light pizza option a try. Also, it was on sale.

When I was a tot, I abhored Tombstone and other frozen pizzas. Back in my day (the late 80s), Pizza Hut had yet to become crap pizza with far too much oil, and thus was a wonderful dining experience. Compared to the old hand-tossed or pan pizzas at Pizza Hut, frozen pizzas had no flavor and no body.

But then, in the last several years (read: college), I acquired a taste for frozen pizzas. Thin-crust, rising crust, stuffed crust, it was all good, and it was relatively cheap. Among the “cheap” brands, Tombstone took the top spot in my heart for its wide variety of toppings and crust styles. To this day, the Tombstone BBQ Chicken is one of my favorite frozen foods of all time.

I’d never bothered to try the light ones because I’m already pretty svelte, but the toppings on this vegetable pizza (including broccoli! green onions! red bell peppers! black olives!) struck me as a potentially interesting and different pizza experience.

And it was! I’m not exactly sure what they did to the traditional Tombstone pizza to make it qualify as Light, but I did notice the crust was a bit more crackery, which is no big deal to me. Other than that, the onions and olives played nicely with the peppers and mushrooms and … whatever else was in there. I especially liked the fresh onion flavor of the green onions. It wasn’t an overpowering onion flavor like some other onions I’ve had on pizza. And the cheese was plentiful enough to cover the pizza and didn’t peel off in one sheet like some cheap pizzas.

My main complaint with the pizza is that, other than the onions, it is a bit light on the flavor. I generally sprinkle my frozen pizzas with crushed red pepper stuff to spice it up, and this pizza benefited greatly from that. You can get pizza-style spices at any grocery store for cheap, so if you’re not already augmenting your frozen pizzas with sprinkled spices, you should be soon. And if you’re counting calories, you can start with this pizza.

Trader Joe's Steelcut Oatmeal

December 14, 2007 | Reviewer: Abi

Price: $1.99
Serving: 1 package, 8oz.
Calories: 150
Fat: 4%, 2.5g
Sodium: 2%, 40mg
Protein: 5g
Carbs: 9%, 27g
Fiber: 16%, 4g
Weight Watchers Points: 2 Points

Trader Joe says: T.J’s Frozen Steel Cut Oatmeal brings speed and convenience to the previously time-consuming process of cooking steel cut oats. No longer do you have to slave or a hot stove, stirring and stirring just to enjoy a bowl of this wholesome, nutritious, delicious oatmeal.

Abi says: The only oatmeal I ever ate as a kid came in packets. Sure, we had old-fashioned oats up in the cupboard, but I think that we only used those for making cookies, not for actually eating for breakfast in the form of oatmeal. I didn’t even realize until a few years ago that actual, real, non-processed, steel cut oatmeal requires a rather long cooking time (nearly an hour!). In fact, I’ve never even made stove top, slow-cooked oatmeal.

Of this, I’m a bit ashamed. I love oatmeal and I should be enjoying it in all of its forms. Alas, the closest I’ll likely ever get to that (until I have a family to cook oatmeal for) will be the big, slightly suspect pots of oatmeal at Au Bon Pain (have you had oatmeal with roasted almond slices and toasted coconut and brown sugar? No? Then you have not lived!)*.

In an effort to reduce my dependence on instant oatmeal and stop paying $4.00 for the ABP stuff, I picked up a box of Trader Joe’s pre-cooked, frozen steelcut oatmeal. The box contains two individually shrink-wrapped cylinders of oatmeal. These cylinders bear more than a passing resemblance to the frozen forms of Trader Joe’s Artichoke Spinach dip and French Onion Soup. Way to reuse your industrial packaging equipment, Trader Joe’s!

Unfortunately, the bubbly nature of oatmeal requires that one selects a quite large container for heating. On the first go-round I’d fogotten this edict of breakfast porridge and managed to spend the first 20 minutes of my work day cleaning out the microwave.

On the second try I sat down to a bowl of steaming, fluffy steelcut oatmeal and instantly realized why I haven’t purchased this item in the past and why I’ll never purchase it again in the future: blandness. Steelcut oatmeal might have the upper hand when it comes to fiber, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty, taste wins ever time for me. Trader Joe’s Steelcut Oatmeal is a good idea, but the lack of the merest hint of flavor had me reaching for some strawberry jam and figuring that my earlier failure in oatmeal preparation was a sign that some things are better made at home, where there’s plenty of real maple syrup and cinnamon.

*I didn’t even know that they had oatmeal at Au Bon Pain until I read this rant on Craigslist.