SNACKDOWN: Healthy Choice vs. Lean Cuisine in Battle Ravioli

Here at Chez Love, we are no strangers to the delicacy of the frozen meal. Many a night has been saved by the good graces of an Amy's frozen pizza or a pint of ice cream. So when we saw these two varieties of gourmet ravioli, we knew a snackdown was in order.The two varieties wouldn't have seemed out of place on the menu in a nice restauraunt. Lean Cuisine boasted a pumpkin ravioli with creamy sauce with walnuts, snap peas, and carrots, while Healthy Choice gave us a lobster cheese ravioli with green and yellow zucchini in a vodka sauce. Both sounded excellent and filling for a cold night.Unfortunately, we couldn't stomach sampling more than a bite of each. While each was visually appealing- the LC's julienned cuts of vegetables and the HC's hearty portions, the flavors were each abominable in their own ways. Let's take a journey into the world of Healthy Choice. The ravioli in this dish were mushy with a crumbly, powdery filling and leaking fishy fluid that completely saturated the rest of the dish with a strong canned seafood flavor. When I tasted the vegetables with sauce alone, despite seeing a firm, colorful piece of zucchini, all my mouth could think was "FISH" and resisted my every attempt to shove it in there. The sauce, which had come out of the microwave thick and rich-looking, was runny when I sat down to eat and also tasted like fish. A quick look at the ingredients showed that one of the main offenders was "pollack powder," and after that, the only thing I could associate this was fish food and worse, the flakes that fish food comes in. No thanks.After that, I was looking forward to trying the Lean Cuisine, but Keepitcoming told me not to waste my taste buds. The crisp, colorful vegetables were drowned in the "creamy" sauce, or in our case, the salty sauce. It was an assault on my blood pressure. For some reason, both of these dishes contained an ingredient or component that made it impossible to taste anything else. The ravioli in this dish was on the other end of the spectrum- too firm and almost chewy, with an acidic, yammy flavor to its filling. This was a particular shame, as the dish itself was really pretty.

Unfortunately, we have no winner. The real winner is the pizza we picked up shortly after! Better luck next time. Expect more frozen food offerings in the future...