Diet Food Reviews

Lean Cuisine Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni Review

While frozen meals are not a regular part of my diet, I'm not immune to their convenience, and knowing that Lean Cuisine has offered some well-touted pastas, I decided to give their Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni a try. Lean Cuisine describes this as "stuffed rigatoni pasta filled with a creamy blend of ricotta, Romano and mozzarella cheeses tossed with orange and yellow carrots, zucchini and red peppers in a fire roasted tomato sauce with accents of oregano and basil."

I slitted, nuked, stirred, and re-nuked the bowl according to the package directions and was happy to see a good amount of vegetables floating in the sauce, along with a surprisingly generous topping of mozzarella cheese. The pasta looked like oblong ravioli rather than rigatoni, as they were sealed at the ends. I took a bite of a noodle with sauce, and it was actually - surprisingly - pretty good! The filling, while touting, "ricotta, Romano and mozzarella cheeses" tasted mostly like ricotta, but was creamy and tasty nonetheless. The "fire-roasted" tomato sauce is pretty mild - if you don't like an overly tomato flavor, it's great, though I'd prefer a bit more tomato punch. There was ample shredded carrots in the sauce, but only two or three chunks of tomato and zucchini. A few shredded yellow strips floated around with the carrots - I think they were bell peppers, but they could have been yellow carrots. Hey, I like carrots and all, but how about some mushrooms or broccoli or some other Italian vegetables? There's about eight noodles in the bowl, paired with a salad, made a pretty decent lunch, though wouldn't satisfy me for a dinner.

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Each Lean Cuisine Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni provides 240 calories, 6 grams of total fat (9% of the daily value), 3 grams of saturated fat (15% of the DV), 660 mg sodium (27% DV), 12 grams of protein and 35 grams of carbohydrates which includes 4 grams of fiber and 10 grams of sugars.

One box cost me about $2.00, which is a very reasonable price, and while I'm not a frozen entree convert, I would definitely keep this on hand in emergencies. Two thumbs up from me , and 5 stars from HeatEatReview.

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