Price: $6.49
Serving: 1/8 cobbler, 4oz
Calories:240 per serving
 Calories from Fat: 70
Fat: 12%, 8g
 Saturated Fat: 18%, 3.5g
 Trans Fat: 0%, 0g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 8%, 200mg
Protein: 2g
Carbohydrates: 14%, 41g
Fiber: 4%, 1g
Sugar: 21g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Mrs. Smith says: Every Mrs. Smith’s cobbler is carefully crafted from the finest ingredients, with plump, sweet fruit packed inside our famous golden crust. You bake them fresh, filling your home with that unmistakably warm, appetizing aroma and a timeless sense of anticipation.

Abi says: Like almost every baked good ever produced, this cobbler filled our home with a sense of anticipation. Who doesn’t like fruit baked into its own little pastry coffin? Okay, probably a bunch of you. Also, I shouldn’t have used the word ‘coffin’ there, but that was the first thing I thought of, followed by ’straightjacket’, ‘thermos’ and ‘mummy wraps’. Hey, its Monday.

And just like Mondays, this fruit concoction disappointed everyone. Everyone being me and my husband, who are human beings. I am sure the cocker spaniel-sized raccoons that roam the Stanford Campus totally loved it.

A large part of that disappointment stemmed from the experience gained while making cobblers from scratch. The gist of it is that you take fresh fruit, slice it thinly or cube it, add spices and sugar as preferred, then pour it in a buttered baking dish and cover with a biscuit, pastry, or crumb topping. And bake. Baking is important.

The hardest part of it is the peeling and slicing, so you’d think that the folks at Mrs. Smith’s would have access to amazing degrees of peeling and/or slicing equipment and thus could whip together a passable cobbler is no time flat. But you’d be wrong. The peach filling here included three variants of corn syrup, a boatload of food coloring and a sense of being hoodwinked. Instead of an inside-out version of the delectable apple blossom, this “cobbler” was akin to dumping a can of peaches into a tinfoil dish, adding food coloring and topping it with an untreated block of puff-pastry.

Each bite (and I admit, I only took three bites) was a harshly starchy reminder that this was not a dessert to be consumed by human mouths. However, if you have a family friend with a jaw wired shut and you’re looking for desserts that already contain tons of liquids and very few solids, this could work.

Personally, I just ate the ice cream and vowed never to never again trust Mrs. Smith with fruit. Or pastry.

Price: $2.29
Serving: 1 meal, 9.4oz.
Calories: 270 per serving
Fat: 11%, 7g
Cholesterol: 3%, 10mg
Sodium: 25%, 600mg
Protein: 11g
Carbohydrates: 13%, 40g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Sugar: 2g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Healthy Choice says: Wholesome whole-grain penne pasta with baby portabella mushrooms and iron-rich spinach delivers 15% of your daily vitamin A.

Dafna says: I have never eaten a Healthy Choice meal before. I don’t know if it’s the green packaging, the “different” yet very similar variety of choices or the fact that they’re never on sale. More practically though, I’ve never bought them because most of their meals have meat in them, and I’m not 100% kosher, but I don’t bring un-kosher meat into the house.

So imagine my delight at finding the following: A: this meal is potentially meat-free, B: this meal is “all-natural,” C: this meal is on sale and D: Healthy Choice changed their packaging to something a bit more attractive. These factors alone are worth at least 3 stars.

It even looked fairly promising in its frozen state, with visible parmesan shreds and all. But about half way into the heating process, I realized that strange smell, sort of like a grape lollipop had been heated in an old gym sock, was my lunch. When heated, the pasta was swimming in an intense amount of liquid. The mushrooms were the size of peas, and the cheese had totally disappeared. But I persisted.

The first bite or two actually weren’t so horrible. Sure, the whole grain pasta was gummy, the tomatoes were bitter, the meal itself was insanely salty and the ‘spinach’ was like a thick coating over every inch of the bowl. But what came after was quite the turn-off. About midway through the meal, my throat started sort of burning, like the meal was coated in invisible pepper flakes. I scanned the first few ingredients, no pepper flakes. There must be something unnatural here, I thought. Something unwholesome. Something … un-kosher? Sure enough, that burning sensation, and likely the factor behind of the excess liquid drowning my pasta, was the chicken meat with juices and chicken fat that had snuck onto the ingredients list. Damn. Foiled again.

So all in all? Meal smelled like gym sock. Mushrooms the size of my pinky nail. Deceptively un-kosher. Completely unsatisfying.

If you happen to be spending the day in the Chicago O’Hare Intercontinental, please come on over to my 12:45pm session on Utilizing Social Media to Engage Consumers and Create Brand Advocates. I think the title implies that I’m a Brand Advocate which is true unless you’re talking about Kid Cuisine Fish Sticks (visible disgust), Smart Ones Meals or Campbell’s Garlic Chicken Supper Bakes (the biggest waste of chicken ever).

If you’re really, really interested in the topic, you are more than welcome to watch a LIVE webcast of our panel for just $95.00.

Or you can just wait until my slides and audio are up on Slideshare, for free.

Price: $1.99 (on sale)
Serving: 9.0 oz.
Calories: 320 per serving
Fat: 12%, 8g
Cholesterol: 4%, 10mg
Sodium: 25%, 590mg
Protein: 14g
Carbohydrates: 16%, 47g
Fiber: 15%, 4g
Sugar: 2g
Weight Watchers Points: 6 points

Smart Ones says: Ziti pasta in a delicious marinara sauce topped with mozzarella, monterey jack and parmesan cheeses.

Tara says: I’m Italian, so I love pasta. One would think that I would avoid any pasta that comes prepared in a box, as any other sane Italian might do. Not me, I love a challenge, and furthermore I love cheese. And what is better than one type of cheese on your pasta? Obviously multiple types of cheese. In this meal, Smart Ones provides me with three different kinds, which is great, but fifteen would have been better.

The cooking instructions, as with most Smart Ones meals, were quite simple. I heated up my lunch in the microwave at work and probably overcooked it because that microwave is on crack. I am probably going to get cancer from standing so close to it every day, or maybe I’ll just get super powers. Or grow a new body part. Either of these things would be pretty cool, and maybe I could even get workman’s comp or something.

The first thing I noticed upon peeling back the film cover was that my meal looked nothing like the picture on the box. I know, I know, only a mentally challenged individual would actually expect something like that (don’t hate me PC freaks - turn your vengeance back on Tropic Thunder!), but I wanted to peel back that film and see mountains of cheesy goodness melted perfectly atop my ziti. Suffice it to say, I was disappointed.

While the cheesy goodness was not visible to the naked eye, it was perceptible to the palate. There was definitely a nice cheese flavor present (just one cheese flavor, not 3 as promised on the box), but it did have a bit of a chewy texture. At some points I would get a large bite of cheese and it felt like I was chewing cheese flavored gum (Why has no one invented that yet? I’m a marketing genius).

The pasta was cooked fairly well for being microwaved. It was a bit overcooked for me, but I am really all about al dente pasta. The other thing I liked about the pasta was that it was easily stabbable with a fork. I believe that the main reason for this was that when the cheese melted, it fused several pieces of ziti together into clumps that resembled a stack of logs. I liked this clumping a lot because I had to spend little effort stabbing, and the less time I spend stabbing, the faster the food makes it to my mouth.

The sauce is nice and thick and clings well to the pasta. It has a bit of a sweet flavoring, but you can also taste the Italian spices. I also noticed that there were a lot of black specs in my food, so I am continuing to tell myself that it is the spices, and not something more menacing. The sauce contained small chunks of tomato and also what I believe was onion. The final thing that I will note about the sauce is that it is a bit salty. Eating this dish made me very thirsty, so I had to drink a lot of water, which will result in me having to pee a lot today. That sucks, because there are some nasty chicks where I work and sometimes the bathroom is a little funky.

In all, I would actually eat this again. Good job Smart Ones, you have just proven to me that you don’t completely suck after all.