While we do find the occasional dud, we do tend to enjoy Stouffer’s frozen food line pretty consistently. So we’re excited to dive into the Stouffer’s Rigatoni with Chicken & Pesto today.
If you’re a longtime reader of Freezer Meal Frenzy, this meal might look familiar. That’s because we’ve reviewed the single-serve version of it a while back. At the end of that review, we hypothesized that we’d be eating this meal again, and today we’ll be following through with that, since we’re checking out the Meals for 2 version.
While you can toss this big pile of food into the microwave if you’d like, we’re hesitant to do so with a meal this large. When we’re cooking up a family-sized meal, we like to use the oven or the stovetop. If you use the oven for this frozen batch of rigatoni, you’ll end up spending an hour cooking this thing. (You can see the full cooking instructions at the bottom of this article.)
So, is all that cook time worth it? We certainly think so!
Admittedly, we were a little bit nervous when we pulled this out of the oven to stir it, as the sauce was clumped in one corner of the tray so some of the chicken and noodles dried out. However, we stirred everything together, then popped the meal back into the oven, and it all came out perfectly. In fact, we found the consistency of the chicken to be better than it was in the microwaved single-serve version of this meal.
The aforementioned chicken is juicy and loaded up with flavor. Some of the chunks are pretty large, which means you can see grill marks on them. We’re not sure if these are real grill marks or just markings that are added to give the chicken an authentic grilled look, but these chicken bits are definitely striped.
The flavor of the pesto sauce is on point. It’s a dense flavor, which means a little bit of sauce does a whole lot for the overall taste of the dish. It’s very good, and it’s the perfect complement to the chicken.
We really didn’t have much to say about the noodles the last time we ate this, and we don’t have much to say now either. They’re pretty basic rigatoni noodles, which isn’t a bad thing at all. A few of our noodles ended up a little dry, but we think this could have been avoided if we’d have taken this out to stir just five to ten minutes earlier. (The package recommends stirring it after about 45 minutes, and we’d say you’re better off doing that at about the 35-minute mark just to make sure the sauce coverage is there during the later part of the cook time.)
If you split the contents of the box down the middle — like we did for the picture above — and only eat half a box in a sitting, you’ll be consuming 650 calories (240 from fat). That’s no small amount. Even worse, you’ll end up eating 1,180 mg of sodium. This is clearly not designed for dieters, though we have to admit that’s is pretty filling.
The Meals for 2 version of Stouffer’s Rigatoni with Chicken & Pesto is loaded with calories, but it’s also loaded with flavor. We found the chicken to be a little juicier and more consistent in this version of the dish than it was in the single-serve version, which is welcome indeed. While we don’t suggest eating something this calorie-dense every night, we certainly recommend trying it. It tastes great!
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Stouffer’s meal for two, check out our package scans below.
