Healthy Choice has a history of impressing us with their low-calorie pasta. Their Creamy Spinach & Tomato Linguini is great, and without knowing any better, we never would have guessed the Four-Cheese Ravioli & Chicken Ravioli was a diet-friendly meal. So we thought we’d take the Meatball Marinara for a spin to see how that stacks up.
Like many of Healthy Choice’s other dishes, this one comes with a separate plastic strainer that keeps the main portion of the dish separate from the sauce while you’re heating it up.
Once you’re done heating it in the microwave — for five minutes — simply remove the film from the top, then empty the strainer into the bottom portion of the dish, where the sauce resides. Stir it up and you end up with a meal that looks almost as appetizing as the immaculate version on the box.
So how does it taste? To answer that, let’s jump right into the literal meat of this dish — the meatballs. There’s a very generous portion of these, which you might not expect from a calorie-friendly dish, and these have a great taste. They’re just like Mom used to make. Well, not exactly. Mom’s were a bit more gristly, but Healthy Choice’s are a healthier version of those.
If the meatball content was all there was to praise in this dish, we’d be pretty okay with it. But the rest of it is quite good as well. We really enjoy Healthy Choice’s marinara sauce. It has a nice sweet tang to it. The only problem is that we would have loved there to have been more of it. When we got to the bottom, there was just barely enough to scrape up one last little bite. Of course, this is almost certainly designed to keep the calorie count low — which it does at 280 calories — and it throws in heaps of delicious spinach to make up for it. That makes it pretty hard to complain.
Healthy Choice’s Meatball Marinara has everything a great-tasting pasta should except the guilt. You should definitely keep a stack of these in your freezer.
If you want to know more about the ingredients and nutrition info of this frozen food, feel free to check out our package scans below.
