My first Frozen meal...well sort of.

While standing in the frozen foods section at Kroger, I found myself asking the same question.  

Which one of these actually tastes like it looks?

After skimming the rows and rows of different products and brands, I decided that I needed to play it safe for my first official frozen meal.  The brand was easy for me.  Marie Callender's has never let me down when it comes to their extensive collection of pies.  With that much culinary knowledge, I expected the meal to be equally delicious.  

After that, the purchase was fairly easy.  I love Italian food and the Three Meat and Four Cheese Lasagna stood out as a homerun.  Reasonably priced at $2.99 for a one serving meal, I couldn't help but think how easy this was going to be!  If I drank a full glass of water with my lunch, then I could potentially have a very simple solution to expensive and fattening breaks at work. 

::Sigh:: Why couldn't it be that easy?  

First issue I ran into didn't seem that bad.  The time was 4-5 minutes at full power, followed by 5 minutes at half power.  I felt like this was a very long time to microwave it but decided that they knew best!  How could I ignore Ms. Callender  when she clearly knows what she is doing?  I answered my own question  when I removed the boiling mass of what used to be lasagna.  In its frozen state, there was a lovely layer of cheese on top.  Apparently, it evaporated in the microwave because I could not locate it under the pool of liquid on top.  As disappointing as it looked, I vowed to try it when it was no longer lava hot.  This took about 10 minutes, making my grand total time into this meal at about 20 minutes.  Not exactly my idea of quick bite.  

I took two bites of this lasagna, both including the sauce, pasta and cheese mixture between the layers.  I attempted to get meat in the bites as well but was not able to find more than one or two pieces.  Again, disappointment took over.  The pasta was gummy and tasteless.  The only cheese flavor I could make out was Ricotta (at least that is what the texture led me to believe).  And, if that wasn't bad enough, the sauce was oily and unappetizing.  

I would definitely not recommend this product based on my experience with it.  The image and description on the box were very misleading.