Lean Cuisine Review #1: Butternut Squash Ravioli

To offset my terrible, terrible diet when dining out in restaurants, I cop out a lot of the time at home and stick with the Lean Cuisines. I mean, if I'm going to eat something that's healthy, why bother cooking it myself? Over the course of exploring the wide and diverse offerings from the LC menu, I've found that some are better than others, so in an effort to expand my Lean Cuisine palette, I thought I would branch out from my comfortable revolving stable of flavors and try some of the many other varieties offered in my grocer's freezer.

Butternut Squash Ravioli? How could they take such a delectable gourmet treat and put it inside of a microwavable tray? For starters, it's part of their Spa Cuisine collection, which I guess implies this is the type of food that you would find at some sort of fancy fat camp. The ones the celebrities attend, no doubt. Rest assured, this one's sitting at a cool 4/5 stars on the LC website, so I'm certainly in for a treat.

I figured out how they were able to cram these ravioli into a healthy packaging - there's, like five f'n ravioli in this damn thing, and they try to hide it by covering it with a shitload of vegetables. In fact, there's nothing but vegetables in this meal - no meat.

The Italian cream sauces traditionally achieved their texture from the use of eggs, butter, and cheese, though the Italian found in the Olive Gardens of America usually weigh everything down by covering it with heavy cream. Obviously, neither of these options are particularly lean, so the cream sauce is created here through skim milk, chemicals, and a loose definition of "cream sauce." The box claims that walnuts are in this dish, though what they actually mean is that one lonely walnut has been broken into several pieces and scattered through the tray, perhaps as a game to distract you from how fat you've become. Obviously there was only one texture in this dish - mush - and the yellow butternut squash goop that filled my ravioli was a nice change from the other vegetables, which are constantly reused in most of these meals. Things could have used some salt, but at 590mg already, I didn't dare add anymore.

I think pasta dishes are tricky because they can't add too much without upping the calorie count, plus I'm sure that butternut gel isn't cheap to make since they can't use it in any other meal. If I was at a spa and someone tried to serve me this, I would punch them in the mouth. Still, the ravioli and sauce tasted somewhere in the ballpark of butternut squash ravioli, and the abundance of vegetables means I'm at least full for the time it takes my stomach before realizing it was gypped with regards to meat.

Final Score: 57 out a possible 133.