Price: $2.50 on sale
Serving: 1 pizza, 6 & 1/8 oz.
Calories: 310
Fat: 10%, 7 g
Cholesterol: 5%, 15 mg
Sodium: 18%, 430 mg
Protein: 17 g
Carbs: 15%, 46 g
Fiber: 18%, 4 g
WW Points: 6 Points

Lean Cuisine says: Spinach and mushroom pizza with a blend of mozzarella, asiago, parmesan and romano cheeses and a creamy alfredo sauce.

Adina says: First off, I went into lunch today craving this Lean Cuisine pizza. I KNOW. The words “crave” and “Lean Cuisine” are rarely used in the same sentence, unless the sentence reads, “I ate a Lean Cuisine meal and then I craved seventeen pounds of chocolate to suppress my post-Lean Cuisine hunger.” But it’s true – I knew it was in the freezer, all cheesy and mild, waiting to be loosely compared to real pizza. And I was looking forward to it. You might say that maybe I’m pregnant or mental, and to that I would reply, SHIT.

Tanya at Iateapie.net thought this was a fairly bad dining experience; however, I disagree. True, the pizza sauce is not red. I find this to be a breath of fresh air. Microwave meal red sauces tend to feature chunky bits of tomatoes that have no taste, as if they genetically altered these tomatoes so that they would metaphorically flip you off every time you took a bite. Instead, this showcases a very mild and I think flavorful alfredo sauce. It is not your typical Italian restaurant alfredo where, when you eat it, you can actually hear your arteries screaming as they drown in the delicious albeit deadly sauce. It is a gentler version, a half sister if you will, of the typical alfredo sauce. It is not necessarily the taste you expect on a pizza, but I find that to be invigorating after 4 hours of listening to the same people complain about the same crap at work.

I am becoming a big fan of the lower fat white cheese blend that I noticed meals are featuring more regularly. I sometimes wonder why I don’t eat a bowl of parmesan for breakfast, considering how flavorful and non-deadly it is compared to the neon orange Kraft singles which often top off my egg and sausage muffin. As for the spinach and mushrooms, well – they are spinach and mushrooms. The upside is…I am eating spinach and mushrooms! And those things have fiber or vitamins or something! Wait…is that…energy I feel? From all the goodness that was my pizza lunch? AMAZING.

I do not know if I would necessarily call this a “deep dish” pizza, as the pizza is a fairly shallow 6 and 1/8 ounce meal. You know what, let me say that again. In caps. SIX AND ONE EIGHTH MEAL. Seriously, LC? Did you hire special marketing consultants who were like “now…saying this meal is 6 ounces isn’t going to get this meal flying off the shelves…but what if we said it was 6 and 1/8th ounces…hmmm, now I think we’re on to something…”

I am not a recent elementary graduate. You can’t trick me with your tiny fractions. I am fully aware that the dish you used to make this meal was not deep. I have not succumbed to your sly marketing tricks. I just like this pizza. It is yummy and white and fairly filling. So just say 6 ounces. I will continue to buy this meal but won’t feel like you are staring at me, clipboard in hand, wondering if I took the 1/8th bait. Seriously, do this again and I will leave a 1/8th pile of crap on your front lawn. And you will inevitably not see it and thus step in it because 1/8th is NOTHING AT ALL.

In the end, I think I just like boring food. I don’t like tastes exploding in my mouth, all LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME. I like things that are subtle, mild, pleasant. And so if this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then I would steer clear. Because this pizza is not exciting. It is tasty, but it won’t sweep you off your feet and take you to Fiji. It will cuddle up with you on the couch and rub your feet while you watch your favorite parts of When Harry Met Sally. This is not a James Bond pizza. This is a Billy Crystal pizza.

So I will give this 3 stars, docking one star for being a fairly boring albeit satisfying meal, and then docking another star for being a condescending bitch.

Price: $2.75 on sale
Serving: 1/2 calzone, 4.25oz.
Calories per serving: 280
Reality:
Calories in calzone: 560
Fat: 38%, 24g
Cholesterol: 14%, 40mg
Sodium: 64%, 1540mg
Protein: 20g
Carbohydrates: 22%, 66g
Fiber: 18%, 4g
Sugar: 12g
Weight Watchers Points: 12 Points

Hot Pockets says: Indulge in the authentic Italian style taste of a restaurant classic, right at home! Enjoy a crispy, savory crust sprinkled wit Italian style cheeses and herbs, and filled with premium meats and cheeses. Pepperoni & sausage with green peppers, onions and mozzarella cheese.

Abi says: I didn’t buy this Hot Pocket Calzone for myself. I intended this product for my partner. Yes, for the man I love. You might be thinking that a Hot Pocket is an odd way to show you care, but this is grad school and it was one of the frozen items I tossed in the cart to nourish him through finals week. Sure, the other foodstuffs were Swedish Meatballs and Michael Angelo’s Chicken Parmesan, but George purchases and eats Hot Pockets of his own volition all of the time. And he likes calzones! And it was on sale!

Six weeks later I needed a fast dinner before hitting the gym. “Dang,” I thought, opening the freezer “George is never going to eat that.” So I ate a freaking HOT POCKET CALZONE. Then I went to the gym.

The microwave instructions are practically foolproof: place pocket in magical crisping sleeve, microwave for a few minutes (the box says 3:30, but I don’t trust my microwave and went with 4), let rest, consume.

The crust is everything Nestle claims: Italianish, herbed, crispy (though more crunchy at the corners), savory. As with the Lean Pocket of disaster, this is a successful fillings holding device.

Less successful, yet I ate all of it, is the filling. It is vaguely pizza-like, with some sauce (there’s sauce in there just to tick off all of to Calzone purists - though if you consider yourself a calzone purist you shouldn’t be anywhere near a Hot Pocket.), some gooey cheese I thought was mozzarella but turns out to be IMITATION MOZZARELLA CHEESE* (their capitalization, not mine), and tiny uniform-tasting bits of diced green pepper, sausage chunks and approximately 2 slices of pepperoni.

This isn’t something you eat and feel proud about. Or even somewhat happy about. This is something you eat because you think ‘in the next five minutes I need to put some sort of sustenance in my body and I’ve already had string cheese and bananas for breakfast, so those are out.’ If you already like Hot Pockets - buy these because they’re like a Hot Pocket on steroids.

If you do not like Hot Pockets then this item is not your friend.

*I was wondering how they could get away with saying that this pocket contains real mozzarella cheese when the 3rd item on the ingredients list (after unbleached enriched flour, water and pepperoni) was imitation mozzarella cheese. The strategy became clear when I read further down the ingredients list and found actual, real mozzarella cheese. It comes right after green peppers, of which there are almost none.

Price: 34¢
Serving: 1 package, 2.25oz. + water
Calories per serving: 290
Fat: 18%, 12g
Cholesterol: 1%, <5mg
Sodium: 49%, 1,180mg
Protein: 7g
Carbohydrates: 13%, 38g
Fiber: 8%, 2g
Sugar: 1g
Weight Watchers Points: 6 Points

Maruchan says: Ramen noodles with vegetables. Fast and tasty as a hot snack or a delicious meal - anytime.

Abi says: You know you’re making a bad food choice when other people in Wal-Mart give you a look that says “Oh my God, you’re buying that?”

The negatives of Instant Lunch are vast: powdered chicken flavor that doesn’t fully dissolve in water (clumps, mmm), styrofoam packaging that mocks recycling efforts and microwave instructions that really read “Don’t put styrofoam in the microwave, you idiot. Heat water separately.”

On the plus side, this thing cost all of 34¢

And it didn’t taste like an old sock.

Between the excessive salt and uh, the excessive salt, there isn’t much good I can say about this lunch but “35¢! Woo!”

Price: $2.00 (sale price, Safeway)
Serving: 1 package, 10.5 oz.
Calories: 230 per serving
Fat: 9%, 6g
Cholesterol: 9%, 30mg
Sodium: 21%, 500mg
Protein: 17g
Carbohydrates: 10%, 30g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Sugar: 4g
Weight Watchers Points: 4 Points

Eating Right says: Tender white meat chicken, tomatoes, yellow bell peppers and zucchini with whole-wheat linguini in a flavorful sauce.

Nicole says: I grabbed this meal on sale for one of those days when I wanted a light meal. It’s tiny and super-low-cal. The whole wheat pasta adds an interesting dimension, though it happens to taste less like whole wheat than any other whole-wheat product I’ve had - the give-away is the texture, which is a bit soft, grainy and disturbing.

The veggie selection is a nice break from the norm - most of the non-sauce veggies are small zucchini cubes, with some 1-inch yellow pepper sections included. They are not highly seasoned, so you get a light actual veggie taste on all, but peppers did not stand up well to the nuking. The zucchini is the tiniest bit soggy, but the pepper is bordering gelatinous.

The chicken has little flavor and sits right on the fine line between real chicken pieces and the chalky, mis-textured masses that must be some sort of compounded meat. So not bad, and the serving is good for the meal size - four medium pieces (about the same as a McD’s chicken nugget) and three smaller pieces. They are indeed both tender and white-meat.

The sauce is the closest thing we have to a winner here. It’s far more flavorful and complex than your average LC tomato sauce, though tomatoes are the main ingredient. The vegetable variety lends nice vegetable flavors and there are some nice herbs added. However, the sauce still manages to be watery in texture.

The meal is filling for it’s size, probably due to the large pasta portion. I am still awfully glad I have some yogurt and pudding in the fridge for an afternoon snack, but most could get through to dinner with this for lunch.

I wouldn’t recommend against this meal, but I don’t think I’ll be purchasing it again.