Heat Eat Review

• Home
• about
• archives
• the editrix
• contribute
• contact

Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn. ~Garrison Keillor

Get reviews sent to your Email or via RSS

Lean Cuisine 80’s Commercial

April 13, 2008 | Reviewer: Abi Jones

Nonsensically hilarious things in this commercial: funky aerobics moves, enormous portions of Lean Cuisine and guys at the beach who lack all self-control. I’ve seen hot people in my lifetime and they’ve never made me bite a towel. Also, did anyone give thought to what happens to a peach-colored bathing suit when it gets wet?

I know, I expect too much from television.

Smart Ones Pasta Primavera

April 11, 2008 | Reviewer: Abi

SRP: $3.33 (free from Smart Ones)
Serving: 1 meal, 9oz.
Calories: 280
Fat: 9%, 6g
Cholesterol: 4%, 10mg
Sodium: 29%, 700mg
Protein: 12g
Carbs: 15%, 44g
Fiber: 22%, 6g
Sugar: 7g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Smart Ones says: Tender bow tie pasta with broccoli florets and julienne-cut carrots in a creamy parmesan sauce

Abi says: Smart Ones sent us some coupons for free meals. I should have known better than to use one of them. Sure, brief look back at my dalliances with Smart Ones meals reveals that there are few items that I enjoyed: Smart Ones Thai Style Chicken and Rice Noodles and Smart Ones Chocolate Chip Muffins. But hey, I like almost all Thai food and muffins. Well, except Thai food with too much basil or muffins with blueberries. Or bananas. Or almond extract, which seems picky but still leaves a lot of muffins.

Uh, yeah. So about that frozen food that I don’t like as much as Thai food or muffins. Smart Ones, do you expect dieters to eat this and be satisfied? The pasta sauce is a big bunch of bland. For as long as I eat diet frozen food (which could easily be the rest of my life because they keep coming out with New! things) I will never understand why companies choose to ship bland items.

If I were on a diet, I’d want every single, little thing I ate to be a party in my mouth. This means flavors. This means spices. This does not mean ‘parmesan’ sauce without a detectable hint of cheese. A soon-to-be dietician friend and I were talking the other day and she was just flabbergasted at the way people try to diet and lose weight without flavors. Eating bland food won’t make you want less food, folks; it will just make you want tasty food. And those spices that make a difference in satiety? They don’t have calories. Its a miracle!

Resting in that bed of ‘parmesan’ sauce (which cooked up quite simply and beautifully, getting my hopes way to high) is the pasta. Bow tie pasta is a nice pasta to eat because it is easy to stab with a fork and the folds of the bow ties hold sauce well. If the sauce had been good I’d probably be raving about the pasta, but the sauce was not good, so all I can do now is wonder why they don’t just make the pasta out of whole wheat.

And the vegetables. Oh, vegetables. For me, ‘Primavera’ means one of two things: lots of vegetables or a bunch of naked women (okay, women draped in diaphanous silks) parading about in the forest and/or being kidnapped by Zephyr and then turning into some plants. This meal lacks vegetables, nudity, Federal offenses and metamorphoses, earning it an enormous FAIL.

Okay, so if it actually had nudity I’d be a bit freaked out., but still where are the vegetables? All I could find were the stalk parts of broccoli. Yes, the lame parts of the broccoli. If the front of the box says that your meal contains broccoli florets, then it is in your best interest to include the actual flower-like part of the broccoli. I felt like the frozen food world was playing a joke on me. And maybe it was playing a joke on me. When I went to read the back of the box to record the information for this review I found not one, but two typos:

How this meal escaped into the wild I’ll never know, but if Smart Ones took it back to the lab and added real broccoli florets and seasoning (cheese and garlic) then it could be four star material. Until then I will just be content in the fact that I don’t have any more coupons for free Smart Ones meals on hand.

Trader Joe’s Chicken Chile Verde Burritos

April 10, 2008 | Reviewer: Guest Reviewers

Price:$2.69
Serving:1 burrito, 7oz.
Calories:360 per serving
Fat:13%, 9g
Cholesterol:17%, 50mg
Sodium:40%, 960mg
Protein:21g
Carbohydrates:16%, 49g
Fiber:11%, 3g
Sugar:2g
Weight Watchers Points: 7 Points

Trader Joe says: Nothing. I guess they had nothing clever to say about this product.

Angela says: I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of burritos. Frozen, fast food, homemade, breakfast, I’ve tried (and loved) them all. And around here, they’re not hard to come by. So when I was shopping in Trader Joe’s for something to eat for lunch at work, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try a burrito I’ve never tried before.

Enter this little guy, the Chicken Chile Verde Burrito. First things first, it comes in pack of two. The pack is not resealable, so I suggest just bringing one to work and leaving the other at home, unless you trust the freezer at your office, which I don’t. The instructions tell you to first defrost the burrito on 50% power for two minutes, and then cook on full power for one minute, which is what I did.

Now, generally I associate Trader Joe’s with (mostly) healthy food. Upon reading the ingredients, I realized that this burrito may not be much different than the ones you find in your regular grocer’s freezer section. The amount of salt is really what got me. 40% of your daily value? Wow! I’m not one to be discouraged by nutritional information, so let’s get to the eating part.

Upon first look, the burrito is definitely a little wimpy looking. Not that most frozen burritos aren’t, but maybe I just had my hopes up too high. Also, it’s a little soggy and difficult to pick up. So those who care about dripping sauce on their clothes might want to grab a fork and knife for this one. Inside, there is a lot of Chile Verde, and every few bites there is some chicken. I suggest that TJ’s changes the name around to better suit this ratio. The Chile Verde is kind of slimy, and maybe a little too salty. I guess that’s where the 40% daily value of sodium comes in. Last but not least, the end of the burrito is all tortilla, as it is with most frozen burritos. It gets kind of hard when you microwave it, so I recommend not eating that part.

So all-in-all, this burrito is edible, but not really delicious. I will probably eat the second one if I’m in a pinch, but I’m not sure I would buy this particular variety ever again.

Simply Asia Spring Vegetable Rice Noodle Soup Bowl

April 9, 2008 | Reviewer: Abi

Price: $1.50 on sale at CVS
Serving: 1 bowl cup, 2.5oz.+water
Calories: 270
Fat: 4%, 2.8g
Cholesterol: 0%, 20mg
Sodium: 31%, 736mg
Protein: 5.1g
Carbs: 19%, 57g
Fiber: 3%, 0.6g
Sugar: 3.9g
Weight Watchers Points: 6 WW Points

Simply Asia says:Our soup bowl combines authentic 100% pure rice noodles in a delicious broth, vegetables and a traditional seasoning for a quick and satisfying meals in just 3 minutes.

Abi says: Thanks to Gluten-Free Girl, I know that if I were suddenly diagnosed with gluten intolerance I could live a life full of delicious, beautiful food. Sure, it would make writing for Heat Eat Review a bit difficult, but it wouldn’t be a hardship for home eating.

Unless, of course, I decided to purchase this soup bowl. When I dropped this into my basket at CVS (a pharmacy), I must have momentarily blanked on a previous Simply Asia meal that smelled like burnt tires. My excuse: I had a brain freeze after spending a half-hour watching the sun set from the steps of the Supreme Court (highly recommended on warm days, on cold days the bases of the marble columns will turn your bum into a block of ice) and I was on a post-Easter Cadbury Creme Egg Hunt (not for me, I think they are gross and that all of you fondant-loving fools are strange, strange people). Also, I have a website that requires me to eat (or at least heat up and taste) things that smell like burnt tires.

I followed the meal-preparation instructions closely: adding ‘vegetable’ and oil packets (should have been labeled ‘vegetable flakes’ and the oil is optional), filling to the ‘fill-line’ and microwaving for a few minutes. Then I sat down to eat some undercooked noodles. Okay, I can handle that. Another minute sitting on the counter and the ’soup’ was still hot, this time with limp, edible noodles.

Much to the chagrin of my taste buds, the noodles and the brother were both devoid of flavor, leading me to wonder in what Asian country “traditional seasoning” means “colored water”. The Spring Vegetable contingent was represented with four peas and a couple of pieces of dehydrated carrot. Okay, ten pieces of dehydrated carrot, a few kernels of corn and some shreds of green onion (I think). I wish I was kidding about this, but there is more vegetable matter in a single baby carrot than in this entire ‘Spring Vegetable’ noodle bowl. I resigned myself to finishing this flavorless, four-pea-featuring bowl of noodles, then poured the ‘broth’ down the drain.

I am now officially on the hunt for only food that looks fantastically delicious. Well, as soon as I try the 14 boxes of most likely mediocre food sitting in my freezer right now. Simply Asia might be making noodle bowls appropriate for Celiacs and college students alike, but just because you can eat these doesn’t mean that you should.

[Yes, I went overboard with the double and single quotes in this review. If you’d like to make fun of me for that, I have an even better site for your reading/wasting time at work pleasure: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.]