Lean Cuisine Review #4: Spaghetti With Meat Sauce

Spaghetti with meat sauce with mushrooms and basil

In my youth, I was a spaghetti freak. I guess it started with my grandparents, who fed me the Franco-American Spaghetti (not Spaghetti-O’s) when I used to go to their apartment after school. By the time I was older - 8 or 9, I’d imagine (they died when I was 10) – I was making them myself. It was a simple process – open can, put into a pot (in thinking about it, I don’t think they owned a microwave), and heat until done.

In my early teens, I was a latchkey kid, and often had to make my own dinners. Sticking with what I know, it turns out it was easy to make actually spaghetti, too – boil water, strain, and heat up a jar of sauce in the microwave. I experimented through many iterations – browning some ground beef, opening up a can of mushrooms, adding some dried basil and oregano - getting real crazy with it.

I bring this up because the Lean Cuisine spaghetti I ate from this box tasted exactly like what I used to make as a young adolescent – overcooked noodles, sweet sauce with blatant dried herbs, canned, rubbery mushrooms, and tasteless ground beef. It didn’t taste bad by LC standards, and even less so given my fondness for the dish, but I could have easily made the same dish myself in less than 15 minutes. The only benefit to getting it in a Lean Cuisine is the portion control, and the ability to have it in 5 minutes, and I don’t want to pay $2.50 for that. I guess there’s a reason they call these “simple favorites,” and there’s also a reason why I haven’t liked one from this lineage yet.