Price: $3.49
Serving:1/3 pizza, 5.36oz.
Calories: 320 per serving
Calories from Fat: 110
Fat: 18%, 12g
  Saturated Fat: 25%, 5g
  Trans Fat: 0g
Cholesterol: 35%, 12mg
Sodium: 19%, 460mg
Protein: 20g
Carbohydrates: 10%, 31g
Fiber: 4%, 1g
Sugar: 1g
Weight Watchers Points: 7 POINTS

Safeway Select says: Safeway Select Ultra Thin Crust Pizzas have been expertly created with exciting flavor combinations, using premium ingredients that will delight you and your family with full pizza flavor on a delicate, cracker-thin crust that won’t weigh you down.

Add pizazz to your next pizza night with Garlic Chicken with grilled chicken, onions, plenty of garlic and a butter Bordelaise sauce.

Abi says: Bordelaise? Border? Mayonnaise? What? Raise your hand if you know what a Bordelaise sauce is. I’ve read Jacque Pepin’s autobiography and I didn’t have a clue what it was (thank you, Wikipedia) until just now. Bordelaise is a classic French sauce named after the Bordeaux region of France. It contains wine. And meatiness. The New Orleans version is more about garlic, butter and parsley than about red wine and bone marrow.

So, FYI, no bone marrow in this pizza.

But oh dear Lord, the garlic. I am a professed lover of garlic. Garlic and I are chums, pals, BFF’s, but perhaps after this pizza we are frenemies. When I told my husband (we celebrated our first wedding anniversary yesterday) that I was going to write about this pizza he asked if I would tell all of you how bad it was.

So here I am telling you that while you might think that this pizza is scattered with the strangest looking pieces of chicken, those are in fact nearly raw garlic pieces. And the 10-12 minutes they’ll spend in your oven is not enough time to bring them anywhere near edibility. Unless you like old, semi-baked garlic, I recommend staying far, far away from this pizza.

“But wait!” You must be thinking, “aren’t there other redeeming elements? Isn’t there chicken?” Sure, there is chicken, cut into alarmingly small (1/2 centimeter, what kind of chicken is this anyways, did I just combing a fraction and metric measurements?) cubes. And yes, there’s some cheese, all covering up an absurdly buttery sauce. Take a gander at the ingredients…

I don’t think it was an accident that when transcribing the “add pizazz to your next pizza night” text from the box I typed “add pizass to your next pizza night”.

Ingredients: Crust (wheat flour, soybean oil, yeast, sugar, salt, calcium propionate (preservative), soy lecithin (processing aid)), cheeses (whole milk mozzarella cheese [whole milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes], low moisture part skim mozzarella cheese [part skim milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes]), chicken (white chicken with rib meat, water, seasoning [salt, modified tapioca starch, garlic powder, onion powder, chicken powder [chicken broth, chicken fat, maltodextrin, natural flavor], dextrose, spices, maltrodextrin, grill flavor [from partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil], natural smoke flavor, natural flavor], sodium phosphate), sauce (water, modified food starch, sugar, natural flavors [including butter and wine], salt, butter powder [cream, salt], , nonfat dry milk, BHA, autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolized corn protein, garlic powder, onion powder, xanthan gum, spices, extractive of turmeric), butter oil (soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, artificial flavor, artificial color, citric acid), parsley, roasted garlic, onions.

Price: $3.49
Serving:1 pastry bite, 0.71oz.
Calories: 70 per serving
Calories from Fat: 50
Fat: 8%, 5g
  Saturated Fat: 16%, 3.5g
  Trans Fat: 0g
Cholesterol: 6%, 20mg
Sodium: 4%, 100mg
Protein: 1g
Carbohydrates: 1%, 4g
Fiber: 0%, 0g
Sugar: <1g
Weight Watchers Points: 2 POINTS EACH

Trader Joe says: Pastry bites with Feta cheese & caramelized onions, no preservatives, no artificial colors or flavors, keep frozen.

Abi says: After several trips to Trader Joe’s and several rounds of sighing over these little treats, I finally purchased one batch…and then another batch…and then another batch of these puff pastry snacks. It turns out that if I like something enough, I’ll actually make (er, heat) appetizers for my own meals.

These two bite delights require nearly half an hour in the oven, so you’ll have to plan ahead if you want to treat this like a true appetizer and not another portion of your dinner. I’ve found that approximately three puffs per person is a nice way to tide you over until the actual meal. Considering there are 12 puffs in a package, you can just slice the package in half (see cut up packaging in picture), put it on a cookie sheet (no mess! no clean up!) and heat up appetizers for two. It is probably the most domestic thing I do in an entire week.

You should note that these will be super hot when they come out of the oven. I know, you’re an adult and you cooked them at 400 degrees for almost half an hour, but even after they seem cool, the cheese inside will be piping hot. And you might forget they are hot and burn yourself.

If you succeed in not burning yourself, you’ll get to enjoy a light, crispy, slightly greasy pastry surrounding a pocket of feta and cream cheese, topped the briefest dollop of sweetly caramelized onion. What a pleasant way to start any meal.

Ingredients: Puff pastry (enriched wheat flour [wheat flour, malted barley flour, ascorbic acid (vitamin C as dough conditioner), niacin, folic acid, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin], water, butter [milk], salt), cream cheese (pasteurized cultured cream and milk, natural acids, salt, xanthan, carob bean and guar gums), onion, feta cheese (pasteurized milk, salt, cheese culture, enzymes), egg, sugar, unsalted butter [milk].

Hello everyone, my apologies for the absence. I got a series of jerktastic emails and comments on Heat Eat Review and just needed to get away from it for awhile. Most of the commenters here (you guys) are awesome, but there are folks out there on the Internet who seem to hate on everything. I can take criticism of meals, but being mean to people for no reason just gets to me.

This afternoon I’ll post a couple of reviews (I’ve still been eating frozen food) and hopefully get back into the swing of things. My goal is a total of 30 reviews for the month of November – so I need to get you 2 a day! Whew, I might need a drink to get through that.

Cheers,
Abi

Price: 50¢ (sale at Dollar Tree)
Serving: 1 package, 8oz.
Calories: 260 per serving
Fat: 15%, 10g
Cholesterol: 0%, 0mg
Sodium: 45%, 1000mg
Protein: 8g
Carbohydrates: 11%, 34g
Fiber: 12%, 3g
Sugar: 9g
Weight Watchers: 5 POINTS

Ronzoni Bistro says: A delicious combination of rotini in a savory vine ripened tomato sauce with onions, garlic, and basil.

Chang says: As far as I know, few of my acquaintances shop at Dollar Tree. I was there only because I was ordered to get 12 silver (looking) platters in an hour for an event, otherwise I never would have known this meal exists.

I always think buying non-candy food at a dollar store is bad enough, now imagine getting a shelf-stable pasta at a dollar store on sale for 50 cents. You can’t expect to much when it doesn’t even cost a dollar. I bought it because I was intrigued to see how bad it could be, not because I was craving pasta.

Heating up the bagged meal wasn’t a problem, in fact I’m glad I technically didn’t have to find a container for it since I can just microwave it in the bag and eat it out of the bag. As soon as I peeked into the steaming bag, I thought I accidentally bought whole wheat pasta. The color is definitely whole wheat color (see picture), but I scanned the bag again, and couldn’t find “whole wheat” mentioned anywhere.

I shrugged this off and took a bite of the worst pasta I’ve ever consumed. The texture was that of Spaghetti-os left sitting in a can for too long. I don’t expect Olive Garden level al dente from pre-cooked pasta, but it shouldn’t be so soggy that I can barely fork it up. That was not even the worst part of this experience! Even in very cheap and/or very bad pasta (like Banquet spaghetti or canned pasta) you should at least be able to taste the tomato and garlic, right? You know something is very wrong when you can taste zero out of the four items that are supposed to be in the sauce, no basil, no garlic, no onion, not even remotely tomato. Instead, all I could taste was a strange bitter metallic presence. I’m not sure where it came from because I was using a plastic fork.

I threw out the Ronzoni pasta after three bites, I won’t use the line “I got what I paid for” since I didn’t intend to make a meal of it. At least there’s one thing I can be smug about.