While the Freezer Meal Frenzy staff obviously enjoys frozen food, you can sometimes have too much of a good thing. We’ve eaten dozens of frozen burritos, for example, so we can’t help but get excited when we have the chance to sample something that feels fresh and different. We were thrilled when we saw Eating Well’s Frozen Gnocchi with Garden Vegetables. Microwaved gnocchi definitely feels like something a bit out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, eating this meal made us long for the tried and true.
When we took this gnocchi out of the box, we were surprised at the portion size. The dish is more like a plate than a bowl, which means there wasn’t much room for gnocchi or vegetables. Even before the meal was heated up, we weren’t convinced that it would leave us feeling full.
We’re willing to put up with small portion sizes in order to eat great food, but we weren’t really impressed with the quality of the food either. More than anything else, we found this to be inconsistent. Some of the vegetables have a nice texture to them, but others are mushy. We enjoyed some of the gnocchi we ate, but it occasionally has a strong, bitter aftertaste.
A high-quality sauce might have been able to salvage this dish, but we didn’t enjoy the tomato vodka sauce at all. It tastes more like ketchup and vinegar than a freshly made sauce. A sweeter sauce would complement the gnocchi nicely, but this sauce is actually quite bitter.
We’d still like to try a nice frozen gnocchi someday, but this one wasn’t to our liking. Hopefully, we’ll have a better experience with other dishes in the Eating Well line.
For more information about this dish’s ingredients and nutritional content, check out our scans below.
