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: $2.00 on sale
Serving: 1/2 tray, 7oz.
Calories: 160 per serving
Fat: 6%, 4g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 20%, 490mg
Protein: 10g
Carbohydrates: 8%, 23g
Fiber: 36%, 9g
Sugar: 4g
Weight Watchers Points: 3 Per Serving

Trader Joe says: This classic Northeastern Spanish dish from the Rioja area can be enjoyed tapas style with many other savory dishes or just enjoy on its own. The lentils are slow cooked in a broth called Sofrito, made with tomatoes, oil, onion, and red and green peppers. Ole!

Andrew says: Ole! Indeed! But someone should tell this dish that spitting is unkind and frowned upon in polite society. When I opened this shelf-stable plastic pack of sloshy, soupy lentils and veggies, it spit beans and tasty-smelling sauce on my hand and the table. And then when I heated it up in the microwave, the dish proceeded to spurt more of the Sofrito all over the microwave’s turntable dish.

But even with the spillage, there was plenty of smoky, spicy, warm Sofrito for my beans and pepper bits to bathe in. In fact the dish was a lot more soupy than I was expecting. After a few brothy slurps of beans and decently flavorful peppers, I got out my Garden Salsa Sun Chips and proceeded to dip them in the soup. This was a great way to enjoy my chips and soup. I recommend doing this with any chips you like.

The soup itself, sans chips, is also fairly enjoyable, but it gets a bit boring after a while. I love beans in general, and lentils are small but robust and make me feel like I’m eating a lot even when I’m not eating that much. And there are a lot of lentils in this. And the sauce, while pleasant, kind of overwhelms everything a bit with its smoky warmth and there’s not a lot of variety in the flavors going on. It’s OK, but, you know, it’s just OK. This would be great with some other stuff, some meats and cheeses and salads and what not, but by itself it’s just a bit too homogeneous to hold my attention without delicious chips.

Price: $3.50 on sale
Serving: 1/5 bag, 3oz.
Calories: 120 per serving
Fat: 5%, 3.5g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 12%, 270mg
Protein: 3g
Carbohydrates: 7%, 19g
Fiber: 8%, 2g
Sugar: 0g
Weight Watchers Points: 2

Alexia says: Alexia Oven Reds combine delicate and creamy Columbia Basin Red Potatoes, Olive Oil, robust Parmesan Cheese and Roasted Garlic to make this beautifully delicious yet trans fat free culinary creation.

Abi says: Store bought frozen potatoes: Friend or foe? Discuss.

On one hand, it is so freaking easy to chop up some potatoes, toss them with a bit of olive oil herbs and salt and call it a side dish. On the other hand chopping = ugh and who wants to wait 45 minutes for roasted potatoes when we could have potato wedges in 20?

These are the questions I ask myself whenever I consider braving the frozen potatoes section at my local supermarket. Fresh and frozen potatoes are both cheap, but frozen potatoes take half of the time and don’t involve potential over or under-seasoning. Or blood loss.

While I was at Whole Foods the other day, picking up a replacement Amy’s Cheese Pizza Pocket, I decided to go beyond Alexia’s Pesto Pizza Pockets and try out their potato wedges. After reading the backs of all 6 packages of potato wedges, I settled on the Olive Oil, Parmesan & Roasted Garlic Oven Reds. Like me, they were raised in the Columbia River Basin. Unlike me, they are encased in a plastic bag.

The package states that it contains five servings of potatoes. This is an acurate portrayal as I actually got four hearty servings out of the bag. It wasn’t so much that I planned on eating the last two servings all at once, but more that I realized there was nothing edible in my house, the more it seemed that potatoes would do just fine for a lunch.

From my willingness to eat simply these potatoes for lunch you might deduce that I enjoy them a great deal. No deerstalker for you, I’m afraid. These potatoes, which might be marginally better for the environment than the ones from Ore-Ida (or not, because ‘natural’ definitely doesn’t equal ‘organic’) have some sort of weird flavor action going on - straight from the bag. I literally found myself making funny faces when I breathed in the odor of the frozen potatoes.

“Are they rotten?” I wondered, my head whipping back from the bag in a visceral reaction borne of instinctual terror. Then I figured that I just wasn’t used to ‘All Natural’ frozen potatoes or frozen olive oil or something of that hippie ilk. While the potatoes were baking I read the ingredients label and found the item that was causing me such confusion: cheese powder. These potatoes don’t taste like parmesan cheese and rosemary. No, they taste like the child of a bag of Smartfood and a poorly maintained spice cupboard.

Fortunately, this is a problem easily solved with homemade aioli liberally seasoned with smoked paprika. Ketchup works too.

Price: $2.00 on sale
Serving: 1/2 bowl, 3oz. plus water
Calories: 150 per serving
Fat: 2%, 1.5g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 30%, 730mg
Protein: 5g
Carbohydrates: 10%, 30g
Fiber: 5%, 1g
Sugar: 20g
Weight Watchers Points: 3 per serving, 6 per bowl

Betty Crocker says: A warm delicious, single-serve dessert that’s ready in minutes straight from your microwave! Now you can treat yourself to a warm indulgent dessert without all the preparation, time and clean-up!

Andrew says: First of all, I must offer my most humble apologies to Ms. Crocker for flubbing her simple instructions on assembling this mini cake. The gist of it is, you dump a packet of chocolate cake mix into the provided bowl with a quarter cup of water and mix well, then pour the soft, gooey caramel icing in pretty patterns on top of the well-mixed batter and heat, uncovered, in a microwave for about a minute and a quarter.

What happened is this: I fumbled with some measuring cups (yeah I know you should use a measuring glass for liquids, that’s beside the point) and found the one-third cup cup, for some reason completely forgetting Betty’s words. I didn’t realize my folly until well after I’d added the ample caramel goo. No matter, I thought, we shall press on for science.

Speaking of caramel, the icing is really very nice: sweet and warm and more than enough to coat the top of your mini cake batter. What happens as it “bakes” in your microwave is that the batter churns up underneath the caramel goo and swirls it throughout the nascent cake. This pleases me.

Once the cake is done, it really is advisable to — as the packaging says — let the cake sit for at least 5 minutes before consuming it. The cake got awfully hot for only spending 1 minute, 19 seconds in my microwave at approximately 780 feet above sea level (science!). Warm caramel and chocolate = good. Scalding hot caramel and chocolate = hospital.

When it was cool enough to eat — but still quite warm — I was heartened at the results, even in spite of my measuring mishap. The cake itself was very, very, very moist. The chocolate is subtle and melds well with the caramel. Even though the cake itself is chocolate, you’ll notice the name of the cake makes no reference to its chocolate nature; the caramel is the star.

In fact, as I worked my way around the rim of the cake bowl and toward the middle, I found a quadrant of the pastry that was about 70 percent caramel goo and 30 percent chocolate goo. This, too, pleases me.

All in all, this is a good way to spend about 10 minutes from start to last moist forkful, particularly if you’ve got a hankerin’ for warm, sweet, choco-caramel goo fusion.