Marie Callender’s Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share Review

Marie Callender's Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share

We love sharable, family-sized frozen meals, so we’re always excited to try more of them. And since the holiday season is fast approaching, we’ve got a little bit of a turkey dinner craving. Thankfully, we’ve found a frozen food that combines the multi-serve format with Thanksgiving-style eats: the Marie Callender’s Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share.

Interestingly enough, the preferred cooking method for this item is the microwave. It will still take a good amount of time to cook — almost 15 minutes in total — but it’s much quicker than the oven, which would take more than an hour. We jumped on the opportunity to try out one of these larger frozen meals in the microwave to see how it would turn out. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)

Before we get into the review, we want to point out that on the Marie Callender’s website, the customer reviews for this item are pretty bad. “Looks like Slop!” laments one user, while another calls it “the sloppiest mess I’ve ever faced eating!” While the picture on the cover makes this look quite good, we did lower our expectations after reading the customer reviews. But here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, we don’t skip out on reviewing something simply because we think it might be bad — the fact that we’ve reviewed more than ten Eating Well meals attests to this.

So, after all that microwaving, how sloppy does this end up? Well, we think the picture below should probably answer that question.

Marie Callender's Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share

This does have a slop-like quality to it, with the mashed potatoes and gravy gooping all over the rest of the meal. The gravy is kind of thin and watery, while the mashed potatoes aren’t as firm as they need to be. The thing is, we think this problem could have been avoided easily enough if Marie Callender’s would have simply added little dividers to the tray to keep everything from inevitably flowing together.

For a microwavable take on a Thanksgiving dinner, this actually doesn’t taste half bad. While the consistency of the potatoes is pretty runny, they actually taste pretty decent. Ditto for the gravy — in fact, the gravy actually does enhance the flavor of the potatoes.

The stuffing is a bit soggy and rubbery, but it also tastes pretty good. There’s definitely a strong celery taste to it, so celery haters will probably recoil in disgust, but anyone else will probably find this to be alright. It does get a little dry in places, but that problem is simple enough to solve by mixing it into the sloppy potatoes and gravy.

Now, there actually isn’t a whole lot of turkey in this dish. You’ll find a few pieces here and there, but the vast majority of this dish is potatoes. The turkey that’s present, however, isn’t very good. The texture ranges from soggy to dried-out, and there’s not much flavor to speak of. You can dunk it in the potatoes to improve it a little bit, but it’s definitely the worst part of the meal.

Having said all that, we should point out that this doesn’t compare to a home-cooked turkey dinner. The reheated leftovers you eat the day after Thanksgiving will put this frozen dinner to shame.

According to the box, there are 2.5 servings inside. While we think two servings is easier to manage, we don’t know that one person would eat the whole package at once. This is actually a pretty substantial amount of food. If you stick with the box’s recommendation, you’ll be consuming about 240 calories and 1,060 mg of sodium. If you somehow end up eating the whole thing at once, that grows to 630 calories and 2,840 mg of sodium.

The Marie Callender’s Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share is quite unpopular, even among Marie Callender’s fans. While we don’t think it’s as bad as you might expect, it’s certainly no replacement for a real Thanksgiving dinner — even a reheated one.

To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Marie Callender’s turkey dinner, check out our package scans below.

Marie Callender's Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share
Marie Callender's Turkey & Stuffing Meal to Share
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Vivo
Vivo
2 years ago

I used to eat Marie Calender’s Turkey Dinner, but once I found out how much sodium is in one dinner, I immediately stopped. it is recommended that we shouldn’t eat more than 1,500 to 2,400mgs of sodium a day. The Marie Calender Turkey Dinner contains a whopping 2,840mgs of sodium. That’s more sodium than any American should eat in a day.

The Marie Calender Turkey Dinner is not the problem. The problem for the average American is how do I eat three meals a day and keep my sodium consumption at 1,500 to 2,400mgs. If one would consume three Marie Calender Turkey Dinners in a day, one would consume nearly 6,000mgs of sodium. That’s enough sodium to cause the human body to swell, and the small amount of food in each container wouldn’t even fill you up.

Samuel
Samuel
1 year ago

Your review is as inconsistent as the dinner itself. You never deliver a final verdict – instead switching back and forth between echoing the harsh (and accurate) criticism of other reviews while somehow suggesting that it’s an acceptable meal because it should not be compared to a real turkey dinner (Of course it should not be compared to the real thing, as no frozen dish should).

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