Price: $2.04 at Target
Serving: 1 Meal, 7.6oz.
Calories: 390
Fat: 17%, 11g
Cholesterol: 7%, 20mg
Sodium: 19%, 460mg
Protein: 14g
Carbohydrates: 19%, 57g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Sugar: 16g
Weight Watchers Points: 8 Points

Kid Cuisine says: Just when you thought it was safe to finish the fish sticks -da dum, da dum - along come our fruit Gummy Shark Snacks. A whale of a meal!

Abi says: This meal wasn’t so much a lunch as an act of vengeance. If you’ve been doing some sinning lately (Fat Tuesday festivities and poor voting choices on Super Tuesday both come to mind), you could always choose this meal as part of a Friday Lenten penance. It must be worth at least 40 Hail Marys.

I am fortunate in knowing that this is probably the worst video I’ll ever make and the worst item I’ve ever consumed: it can only get better from here. Please leave comments below for future video subjects and suggestions for improvement.

Thanks,
Abi Jones

Price: $2.50 (on sale)
Serving: 1 entree, 10oz.
Calories: 270
Fat: 4%, 3g
Cholesterol: 11%, 40mg
Sodium: 27%, 660mg
Protein: 19g
Carbs: 13%, 42g
Fiber: 0%, 0g
Sugar: 11g
Weight Watchers Points: 6 Points

Lean Cuisine says: Grilled chicken breast with pineapple, water chestnuts, and sesame flavored rice.

Kelly says: Upon first glance at this meal I thought “Wow, a whole chicken breast! Crazy!” And now I know that I should listen to my inner voice because it is right all of the flippin’ time. A whole chicken breast is crazy. When I hear the word ‘teriyaki’ I envision dark meat chicken (thighs, to be specific), a scoop of sticky white rice, and a drizzling of sweetly spicy and salty sauce.

Maybe some vegetables too.

I don’t picture a tired, worn-out, whole breast of chicken that’s been cooked in the microwave. I don’t imagine powder-covered nibs of rice claiming to be sesame-flavored when they are in fact just tongue-coating. I don’t think of the bland crunch of water chestnuts, which must be served alongside another vegetable in order to have any meaning in a meal.

In short, when I see teriyaki, I don’t see this Lean Cuisine meal. Whose idea was it to have an enormous chunk of chicken in there? Who thought it would microwave completely without drying out the edges, leaving them tough and gnarly? Doesn’t Lean Cuisine have a stable of food scientists perfecting dishes like their wonderful Thai Style Chicken and Rice? Where were those people when someone decided to make this dish?

This meal can be turned around. All Lean Cuisine has to do is pre-chop the chicken into chunks, add 10 times the veggies, not putting the veggies in the sauce (where they turn to total mush), and forego the pineapple chunks (they are slimy and gooshy after the microwaving). Oh, and select a completely different method of rice preparation and seasoning, because this is the worst rice I’ve ever had in a frozen meal. I know, that seems like a lot of work, but I have confidence in the people of Lean Cuisine. Until that change occurs, I will stay far, far away from anything resembling this meal.

Price: $3.99
Serving: 1 crab cake, 3oz.
Calories: 220 per serving
Fat: 22%, 15g
Cholesterol: 25%, 75mg
Sodium: 18%, 420mg
Protein: 11g
Carbohydrates: 5%, 14g
Fiber: 12%, 3g
Sugar: 3g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 per cake

Trader Joe says: Nada. They just have a photo of some nice looking crab cakes with a dollop of dill sauce and what looks like lemon and a green salad.

Abi says: I’ve had a lot of trouble writing this review. I know, I probably say that every 5th review, but this time I really mean it. This time, whenever I think about how bad these crab cakes were I throw up a little in my mouth.

Trader Joe’s ‘fresh’ crab cakes go directly against all of the wonderfulness that characterizes TJ’s. Instead of flavorful, interesting food, purchasers of these crab cakes get two three-ounce patties of minced crab meat bound with enough mayo and pureed red bell pepper to confuse the palate. Is it crab, or is it a non-crab pseudo-fish substitute created by evil vegetarians?

These crab cakes aren’t microwaveable (there are no microwaveable crab cakes available at this time. If you see some in the store with microwave directions, do not buy them.), but they are a pre-made, ready-to-cook food and I know that crab cakes cook up super fast with very little work. So little work in fact that it is easy to burn and/or overcook them.

Mine in the photo are overcooked, but overcooking doesn’t account for the gummy interior of each cake. If you’ve ever had good crab cakes, you know that they should essentially be lumps of crab meat barely held together with a binder of egg, bread crumbs, and a bit of herbs and spice. I don’t think the people at Trader Joe’s ever got that memo or perused The Joy of Cooking (Joy is also recommended by Thomas Douglas, author of I Love Crabcakes!, so you can trust me on this one). Instead, these crab cakes are like crab hamburgers. But with lots of mayonnaise. Inside of them. I suppose these would be pretty effective for feeding seafood to babies. Or my grandfather, who I just learned had such bad acid reflux recently that all of his food has to be blended until his esophagus heals. There’d be no blending necessary with these crab cakes.

These crabcakes earn zero stars. ZERO. I’ve also written a letter to Trader Joe’s letting them know how bad these are. My hope is that enough people will complain and Trader Joe’s will make these disastrous seafood items disappear from the shelves, replaced by something more palatable, like quesadillas. Or edible crab cakes.

This review is dedicated to you, all of your poor folks who don’t live within driving distance of a Trader Joe’s. This one time, you get to gloat about your shopping situation.

Price: $2.00 on sale
Serving: 1 bowl, 9oz.
Calories: 290 per serving
Fat: 8%, 5g
Cholesterol: 10%, 30mg
Sodium: 33%, 790mg
Protein: 15g
Carbohydrates: 14%, 42g
Fiber: 24%, 6g
Sugar: 2g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Per Bowl

Taco Bell says: Mexican-style rice, refried beans, steak strips, smoky fiesta sauce with onions, red bell peppers, and green bell peppers

Andrew says: The terror I felt when I beheld this non-frozen, non-refrigerated, Taco Bell-sponsored meal is indescribable. Tally it up: shelf-stable meat with spicy sauce and refried beans and the Taco Bell name on the packaging. Would a real-life zombie be more or less scary?

Honestly, I do love me some Taco Bell. I always go for the double decker taco or a Baja beef chalupa if I’m feeling saucy. I also enjoy the “Mexican” “pizza” and the empanadas, which is essentially Taco Bell’s version of the McDonald’s apple pie. Taco Bell is what I thought it was: it’s cheap and potentially a gastrointestinal disaster. It doesn’t disgust me or surprise me, but it nearly always satisfies.

Still, though, with Taco Bell’s reputation as a slapdash fast-food outfit, the idea of shelf-stable food (yikes) with the Taco Bell name and all the baggage that carries (what is this meat made of, anyway?) is intimidating. But because Abi was kind enough to send me this food for free to review, I dove in with only a fork to protect myself.

The packaging makes it look as though you can expect about a third of the bowlz’s volume to be taken up by the meatlike steak strips. This is not actually the case. I didn’t bother to count how many strips I consumed, but I’m going to bet it was fewer than 10. Perhaps eight? And due to the monochromatic nature of the meal (brown rice, brown beans, brown sauce, brown meat and peppers dulled to a brownish red or green), when you’re done heating it up and you go to stir it, you’ll probably do what I did and stir it all up into a beany, rice-y, meaty paste.

How did it taste? How DIDN’T it taste! Uh, well it didn’t taste much like anything I’d order at Taco Bell in real life. The beans and rice are true to the Taco Bell canon, but the steak bits are small and unsatisfying, not at all like the steak bits you get when you splurge for the steak gordita or chalupa (I’m not kidding, those steak chunks are quite tasty). The spice is generic and doesn’t even approximate the drive-thru Tex-Mex appeal of a Taco Bell dish.

Overall, I’m impressed the dish didn’t make me go blind or give me the Ebola virus, and considering that, I can’t really recommend humans willingly consume this.