Price: $2.00 (on sale)
Serving: 4 oz. (2 sandwiches per box)
Calories: 250 per serving
Fat: 11%, 7g
Cholesterol: 5%, 15mg
Sodium: 23%, 550mg
Protein: 11g
Carbohydrates: 12%, 35g
Fiber: 16%, 4g
Sugar: 3g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Eating Right says: Beef strips and fat free mozzarella cheese in a flaky crust.

Alex says: I did not have high expectations for this meal. In my book, it doesn’t have a lot going for it. It’s an Eating Right meal, it costs all of two dollars, and tries to take a delicious but terribly unhealthy food and put it into a nice, mass-produced, nutritionally sound package. I think that we should all know by now that in the frozen food world, this has “fail” written all over it. To fully expose the stuffed pocket of awful that is this meal, I will break it down into its components.

Let’s start with the beef strips. The list of ingredients tells me that there is indeed beef in this here sandwich, specifically “cooked beef strips ground and formed (contains up to 15% of a seasoning solution of…blah blah blah).” I’m sure this sounds terribly appetizing to you, reader. To make it sound even more appetizing, I will tell you that these beef strips resembled ham in both flavor and texture much more than they did beef.

Next comes the “fat free mozzarella cheese.” For the sake of accuracy, I’m going to rename this component “watery dairy-like substance.” As with any product of its sort, there was not nearly as much cheese in the sandwich as the picture on the box would have you believe, but I was pleasantly surprised with the quantity of quasi-dairyness inside. However, I very much value quality over quantity, and not even an industrial vat of watery dairy-like substance could make this any better.

Before having to put any of this food in my mouth, I had hope for the flaky crust. While microwaving the sandwich, the meal actually smelled of real, bona fide bread. Needless to say, I was amazed. After all, Hot Pockets don’t waft bread-scented air towards your nose while cooking, but I would rather eat a Hot Pocket any day over this. The crust was indeed flaky, but for lack of a better way of putting this, not in a good way. Not that I was expecting buttery, pie crust-y flakiness, but I would rather have flat, soggy crust than the unsettling dry blandness present here.

There is one more component to this sandwich: what’s missing. Everyone knows that a Philly Cheesesteak contains ample amounts of onions and peppers along with cheese and beef. You probably can’t see them in the picture, but the box depicts several pieces of onion in the sandwich. I had one dime-sized piece of onion in mine. What’s really missing, however, is the peppers. There may have only been one measly piece of onion, but its onion flavor was semi-present throughout the sandwich. Peppers never came anywhere near the factory.

In conclusion, this sandwich should in no way be used as a substitute for or facsimile of a real, or even semi-real Philly Cheesesteak. However, if you’re after a sandwich with a watery cheese filling with beef strips that seem like they’re not all wrapped up in a scarily dry, flaky crust, this sandwich is for you.

Price: $3.49
Serving: 1/12 of the pan, 1.4oz
Calories: 170 per serving
  Calories from Fat: 70
Fat: 12%, 8g
  Saturated Fat: 13%, 2.5g
  Trans Fat: 1g
Cholesterol: 5%, 15mg
Sodium: 4%, 85mg
Protein: 2g
Carbohydrates: 8%, 24g
Fiber: 0%, <1g
Sugar: 14g
Weight Watchers Points: 4 Points

Duncan Hines says: First brownie that comes frozen and ready to bake. Packaged in convenient, oven-ready trays - no prep and no clean-up necessary. Ready to serve in just 30 minutes from freezer to oven.

Abi says: Sometimes when I’m at a conference or a non-food professional event someone will introduce me as a person who knows a lot about frozen food. This leads to the inevitable ‘So what is your favorite frozen food?’ question, to which I want to reply ‘I have a whole blog section about that.’

But last week, instead of telling someone about my favorite frozen food, I said flat out that there is not one acceptable frozen brownie on the market. And then I got looks that basically said “How many frozen brownies does someone have to eat to know that?”

I’ve thought a lot about this frozen brownie problem. Sure, it is dessert. And dessert in almost any form is going to be good. But judged against the vast pantheon of desserts on Heat Eat Review (yes, there’s a frozen desserts category), these oven ready items are a castrated version of real dessert. And it isn’t just the preservative-laden ones that you get from Wal-Mart. Even the Trader Joe’s ready-to-bake brownies leave a lot to be desired.

And these ones aren’t even brownies. These are blondies. They bake up golden brown into an enormous lazy-man’s cookie. Mmmmmm, lazy-man’s cookie. But looks aren’t everything: the dough in these falls flat, tasting barely decent fresh out of the oven and turning into something less than utterly delicious upon cooling. Weirdly, the most succinct review of this is on Wal-Mart’s website:

This product does not at all taste like brownies,it tastes more like a cheap cake that has been sitting around for weeks and has became [sic] stale.

Furthermore, the chocolate chips included are miserly smidgens of chocolate, each just big enough to remind you that there’s better chocolate in the world and right now you are not eating it.

Combining stale cake and lame chocolate into one medium-sized tray made a dessert that managed to stick around my house for days before being totally consumed. It was as though we all knew these brownies were spiked with something and thus avoided them at all costs.

The Associated Press is reporting that a Delaware man broke into an apartment and stole Hot Pockets and frozen chicken wings.

The full story is on Yahoo via the AP.

More interesting than the fact that this guy a) tried breaking into six apartments, b) broke into an apartment with people in it, and c) stole Hot Pockets, is that he stole $82 worth of Hot Pockets and chicken wings.

Who has nearly $100 worth of Hot Pockets and chicken wings in his home freezer? Apparently, people in Delaware.

Maybe there’s a Hot Pockets black market out there? Should I worry that some frozen food thief is going to follow me home from the train station one day?

Price: $2.25 (on sale)
Serving: 1 meal, 9.5 oz.
Calories: 260
Fat: 8%, 5g
Cholesterol: 8%, 25mg
Sodium: 23%, 560mg
Protein: 18g
Carbs: 12%, 35g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Weight Watchers Points: 5 Points

Lean Cuisine says: Roasted and seasoned meatballs in a chunky tomato sauce accented with basil and mushrooms. Served with a side of spaghetti.

Adina says: First off, I’d like everyone to take a very close look at the box. And count the meatballs. And then count the meatballs that were on my plate. And then read my letter to Lean Cuisine, which I believe to be a really nice letter considering I was cheated out of a meatball, those bastards.

Dear Lean Cuisine,

Please do not ever ever EVER false advertise how many meatballs there are in a meal to dieters. We pore over those pictures, counting every single mushroom and thread of noodle and dash of basil before committing ourselves to yet another disappointing and unfulfilling lunch. And do not think we won’t notice once we start eating because WE DO. I always do a visual comparison before eating your meals in three fell swoops. This is your first warning – do it again and be prepared to suffer (like being force fed your shrimp & angel hair pasta or something equally as maniacal.)

Love,
Adina

My second complaint is when I went on the Lean Cuisine website to copy the description of the meal, I read this “review”: This spaghetti is almost as good as mine! (SMILE). I love everything about this…SHANNON R. ARDMORE, PA.

Dear Shannon,

Your spaghetti must really suck.

Love,
Adina

Seriously, who says that? People don’t buy Lean Cuisines because they are GOOD. They buy them because they are small and encourage you to count every single calorie you put into your body so that when you gorge on ice cream later that night you don’t feel as guilty. Nobody thinks Lean Cuisine pasta tastes as good as authentic homemade pasta. That is crazy. I am 100% convinced that Shannon from Ardmore, PA is the brain child of one of the LC web developers named Howard. I hate you Howard for underestimating me.

All this aside (and I realize it is a lot of “all”), the meal itself was not bad. The meatballs were meatbally – not as tasty as their swedish meatballs) half cousins, but no one can beat those damn Swedes. The pasta was a little overcooked but I actually think that was my fault. I wouldn’t necessarily call the sauce “chunky” but it was flavorful and red so what more can you ask for.

The problem with this meal is that I definitely have expectations for any meal called “Spaghetti and Meatballs”. And that expectation is that it is going to be a heaping pile of steaming hot spaghetti and giant delicious meatballs covered in a blanket of parmesan cheese. I think any food loving person would agree – Spaghetti and Meatballs is not the kind of meal you eat only one serving of. It is the kind of meal you eat until you want to slip into a food coma and die. And so even though this was a tasty enough meal and in all honesty I’ll probably buy it again despite the false advertising the Shannon, it made me feel depressed that I wasn’t sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, gorging myself on homemade food.

So I gave it a three. Because it made me sad.