We’ll eat pretty much any lasagna that’s put in front of us here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. From Amy’s Kitchen’s vegetarian-friendly take to Devour’s meat-stuffed alfredo version, we can’t get enough of the stuff. So even though Trader Joe’s Spinach Lasagna might not look like much based on the packaging — it’s just a meal shoved into a plastic sleeve with a sticker on it — we were pretty excited to try it out.
This lasagna takes an unusually long time to cook. We expect long cook times on lasagna dishes, but this is pretty extreme, at 10-12 whole minutes of microwave time. We stuck with 10 minutes and that seemed to work out for us, but this might be the longest microwave time we’ve seen on a frozen meal.
Even so, this wasn’t overly hot when it came out of the microwave. It was warm, ready to eat, and evenly cooked all the way through. If you can get through the 10-minute cooking time, you should be able to dig into this dish immediately.
This isn’t a small serving of lasagna; we initially assumed that this huge hunk of lasagna would be too much for one reviewer. However, we didn’t realize that the majority of the dish was spinach. There’s not a ton of pasta, and there’s not that much cheese either — this is better described as a huge helping of spinach with some noodles on the side rather than as a true lasagna.
Thankfully, if you’re a fan of spinach, you’ll find a lot to like here. The spinach is cooked very well; it’s not mushy or slimy at all. The ricotta cheese and other seasonings give it plenty of flavor, as does the tomato sauce. It’s a terrific way to load up on folic acid.
The calorie count in this dish is 340 (160 from fat), which isn’t too bad for a frozen lasagna. The sodium is a teensy bit lower than we expected, at 640 mg, but that’s still not a low sodium level. You’ll want to be careful if you eat a lot of frozen food, because there is quite a bit of sodium in a vast majority of the meals you’ll find in the freezer aisle.
Trader Joe’s Spinach Lasagna is a great meal for lovers of spinach. It’s less lasagna-ish than we expected, but its spinach packs a wallop. Popeye would be over the moon for this!
To learn more about the nutrition or ingredients in this frozen lasagna, check out our package scans below.
