Serving Size: 1 pizza, 7.18oz.
Calories: 440
Total Fat: 28%, 18g
Saturated Fat: 30%, 6g
Cholesterol: 7%, 20mg
Sodium: 33%, 780mg
Total Carbs: 18%, 54g
Dietary Fiber: 12%, 3g
Sugars: 5g
Protein: 19g
Weight Watchers Points: 10 Points

Amy’s Kitchen says: Even if you don’t ordinarily eat spinach, you’ll like this pizza. The light, tender crust made from organic wheat flour and extra virgin olive oil is first topped with our savory italian sauce made from organic tomatoes. Then we add organic spinach blended with feta and sprinkle mozzarella on top. Delicious and satisfying.

Nicole says: It’s rare that I review two meals in a day. Rarer still that I eat organic, vegetarian fare. But see, I’m hungry, and just about all the meals in the fridge are too-be-reviewed. And I like spinach. I’m just not in the mood for Pineapple Black Bean Chicken. And not just because it comes with raisins.

Amy’s pizza has “No GMOs”, or biologically engineered ingredients.

The preparation of Amy’s pizza is onerous and does not allow for the use of a microwave, so you’d better have a conventional or toaster oven. Preheat your toaster oven - okay!… remove the pizza from it’s outer wrapping - this doesn’t look too bad… and let it thaw on the counter for 15-20 minutes. Are you kidding me? I suppose if you love this thing, you’d know about the thaw time, and would plan ahead for your hunger. But being an Amy’s pizza newbie, I was disappointed, and my tummy was growling. I waited, and waited… 15 minutes. Toaster oven bake time is seven to nine minutes - my cheese browned just a bit after 7.5 minutes in - but the meal was cold again fifteen minutes later.

I should probably mention that this pizza was a tad bit freezer burnt out of the work freezer - it’s been in there at least five months [It has been there for at least 10 months - Ed]. This may have affected the quality. But that happens to all of us - you keep pushing back the toaster oven meals in favor of microwave meals so you don’t need to get your security key and enter the other side of your office and wait in a strange, small kitchen for seven to nine minutes rather than returning to your desk to work.

Amy’s pizza crust looks quite lovely, but you can see an awful lot of it - the cheese on this pizza is a hair skimpy. It did crisp up well on the edges, but was a bit soggy towards the middle of the pizza. Back to the cheese, there are two kinds - feta mixed into the spinach and mozzarella to cover. I love feta, but I couldn’t taste it at all. The spinach is about the only flavor you really get out of this pizza. When I hit a tomato, it was juicy and had great texture but it tasted of spinach. This pie is lacking a complexity of flavors that we’ve come to expect from . . . pizza with more than one topping. The spinach, feta, and tomato were concentrated in certain areas, and I liked those bites, but other bites were flat-out bland.

I’m still hungry. It’s just a hungry day. But my stomach stopped growling at me, so I suppose I’m full. I would recommend a side or snack if you wish to make a meal out of this 7.2 ounce pizza. Although it’s like the healthy, vegetarian equivalent of a Celeste pizza. Still, I wouldn’t push this one on anybody unless they had a strong spinach craving.

Price: $2.69
Serving: 11 oz.
Calories: 290 per serving
Fat: 5%, 3.5g
Cholesterol: 10%, 30mg
Sodium: 25%, 590mg
Protein: 16g
Carbohydrates: 16%, 47g
Fiber: 11%, 3g
Sugar: 3g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Trader Joe says: Vegetables and white chicken with a vindaloo curry sauce served over steamed rice.

Chaviva says: The U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected this little bowl of Indian nosh or wholesomeness, but they didn’t inspect it for deliciousness.

When I first saw this dish, I was immediately stoked. You see, I’ll do anything to try a new Indian dish if I don’t have to go to a public restaurant and eat alone. I whipped out my BlackBerry, clicked on the bookmarked Weight Watchers calculator and punched in the figures. I was very pleased to find out that Trader Joe’s Chicken Vindaloo was only 5 points (about the average point value for a Lean Cuisine — my lunch entree of choice), and thus purchased the frozen bowl o’meal.

After heating the bowl for 4 minutes, then stirring the contents (most of which were still frozen) and popping it back in for another 4 minutes, I scurried to my office to sit, huddled over the bowl, for the brief lunch break I take. Upon first bite, I was shocked with the taste of nothing. This is a curry dish and I pride myself on being a “hot head” — that is, I am able to withstand all foods at any heat level — but this meal was completely benign. I decided to not judge it upon first bite, and took another. The spices started finding their way into the nooks and recesses of my mouth, and it started to taste more like Indian fare, but it reminded me of leftovers. I swore I was eating day-old peas and carrots from a failed stew and leftover chicken from a failed soup and leftover rice, just mushed together in a little black bowl and stuffed into the freezer section at Trader Joe’s. I could throw this together at home if the only requirement for wholesomeness is to “taste like a leftover mash.”

The look of the meal also resembled that of leftovers, like when you go to a restaurant and they stuff the rice in with the entree. That drives me crazy because it means that I don’t get that fresh rice-meets-entree experience. I eat a lot of frozen meals at my boring office job, and this definitely doesn’t rank up with my favorites. The chicken was plenty tender, but it failed to wow me the way that a lot of other pre-packaged Indian meals I’ve had have done — especially on the flavor indicator. I did finish the entire bowl, but only becuase I didn’t want to have to figure out the points value for only eating some bizarre fraction of the meal. Afterward, my mouth felt as though it had consumed a full Indian buffet, but a piece of gum took care of that sad untruth.

Alas, Indian nosh, you are banished to the Dept. of Agriculture for further testing. Wholesomeness just isn’t enough these days.

Price: $2.50 (on sale)
Serving: 1/3 bag, 3.67
Calories: 230
Fat: 19%, 12g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 10%, 230mg
Protein: 10g
Carbs: 9%, 28g
Fiber: 17%, 4g
Sugar: 3g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Alexia says: Alexia Onion Rings combine sweet Spanish onions with a delicate all natural Japanese style Panko breading giving them a light, crispy texture that is bursting with real onion flavor.

Abi says: I bought these not just because they were on sale, but because they are described on the front of the package as ‘Crispy Golden Onions with Sea Salt’. I am currently in love with sea salt, so you could probably package freeze dried brussel sprouts and label them ‘Chou de Bruxelles avec Fleur de Sel’ and I would try them.

This package of sea-salted onion rings contains three appropriately side-dish-like servings, so I ate them on three separate occasions, each time heating them up in the oven at high temperatures, but for different amounts of time. It was very scientific.

I have an accurately heated oven, so my concern lay mostly with the large time span that could be used to cook the onion rings. Since I wouldn’t be frying them this time around (are they fried by Alexia? I do not know), I knew that it would require patience to get a crispy coating, patience and the magic of Japanese bread crumbs. Which if you think about it is sort of funny. Our culinary culture hails these Japanese bread crumbs as the Best Thing Ever! but supposedly they (Japanese people - specifically Okinawans) also live a gazillion years because they don’t eat bread, horrible, horrible bread. But back to onion rings.

On the first go-round, I cooked the onion rings for the mid-range of time (about 15 minutes, I think), flipping them halfway through the cooking process. This was a disaster. Half-cooked onion rings are soggy and limp, meaning that they resist any efforts to be flipped and fall apart. This results in separate chunks of breading and onion rings, which is exactly the opposite of what I’d like to eat. I finally pulled the rings out when they’d reached immense hotness and the approximate color of the onion rings on the package. They tasted good (I ate them plain and with ketchup) but the sea salt wasn’t exactly evident (read: Where are you, Fleur de Sel?) and I had to pick up separate pieces of somewhat slimy onion and not-quite-crispy breading. It was quite annoying because doesn’t Panko=crispity crunchiness? And aren’t onion rings meant to be a single unit, not a series of alternative bread-onion-bread bites?

On the second try I just tried flipping the onion rings later in the cook cycle. This resulted in a crispier onion ring (perfect crispness), but also a complete lack of onion. That’s right, the onion was just missing. At first I thought that I had a defective onion ring

On the final attempt I decided that the onion rings could go without flipping and would be cooked for a bit less time than the second try. These ones turned out fine on the outside (sogginess was finally banished!), but the insides were completely devoid of onion. Again. I was not a happy baker. Also, I was tired of eating onion rings that were only marginally better than the super-processed ones from Burger King.

Where did I go wrong? Was I just down to the last of the bag? Had I overcooked them to the point of onion evaporation? Is it possible for crispy breading and tender onion to exist in the same decadent appetizer? You would think so, but Alexia’s inclusion of onion powder makes me wonder just what sort of magic is involved in making onion rings. You’d think that the actual onion was enough.

Price: $3.99
Serving: 1 package, 12oz.
Calories: 470 per serving
Fat: 22%, 14g
Cholesterol: 17%, 50mg
Sodium: 35%, 840mg
Protein: 26g
Carbs: 20%, 61g
Fiber: 44%, 11g
Weight Watchers Points: 10 points

Trader Joe says: Chicken, rice, black beans, salsa, cheddar cheese, and monterey jack cheese.

Abi says: By now we’ve all heard the horror stories about fattening, calorie-laden burritos produced by a company that rhymes with Schmapotle. Their tortilla alone is 330 calories and has 8 grams of fat. Basically, you could have a burrito wrapper or an entire Lean Cuisine.

Wanting to avoid crazy-bad tortillas, I was lured in by Trader Joe’s tortilla-free chicken burrito bowl. Available in the fridge section at TJ’s, these bowls are purported to contain chicken, rice, black beans, salsa, cheddar cheese and monterey jack cheese. Plus, they aren’t frozen, which makes me think that perhaps they are freshly made. I am now aware that ‘freshly made’ does not equal ‘delicious’.

The chicken portion was minuscule and difficult to find, turning my lunch into a game of ‘Find the Chicken’. The cheese, which appears so abundantly in the ‘before’ image, managed to lose any semblance of flavor by the time it became the ‘after’ image, turning into a cheesy version of beans. Great, I had a brick of beans, weighing in at 12 ounces, with the occasional kernel of corn in there to remind me that I could find something better to eat if I tried. Sure, I would have been full if I’d consumed the entire thing, but I wouldn’t have been satisfied.

Newsflash to the world: Instead of paying four dollars for this meal, I could have purchased a can of refried beans for 79¢, opened it, and eaten beans straight from the can. That is just how exciting and delicious I found this overwhelmingly beany burrito bowl.

That blandness, combined with my complete lack of salsa (a crisis in and of itself) meant that I had to venture out into the world to get a sandwich. An $8.00 sandwich. Thanks a lot, Trader Joe’s. From now on, I’ll always have a backup meal on hand.