Healthy Choice is known for their low-calorie takes on frozen food. Many of their dishes — such as the Chicken Sausage & Barley Bowl or the Crustless Chicken Pot Pie — are completely designed around the low-calorie aspect. On the other hand, some of their other dishes seem more geared toward crafting a more traditional experience with a few cuts in the calorie department. The latter side of this spectrum is where the Spaghetti & Meatballs lands.
Like other dishes in Healthy Choice’s Simply Steamers line, this one features a plastic colander that keeps the noodles and meatballs elevated above the sauce while cooking. When the five-minute cook time is up and the microwave dings, simply peel back the plastic wrap, dump the colander into the bowl below, and stir. Voilà, you’ve got your easy peasy pasta ready to eat.
We should warn you, however, to be careful when you’re peeling back that plastic wrap. It’s easy to burn yourself with the steam that is released when you peel it back, so take heed.
Of course, this whole colander system seems to work wonders for some foods in this line, but here we’re a little suspicious that it was used here as an excuse to skimp on the sauce. Had the meatballs been cooked in the sauce, they would have soaked up a good deal of it and ended up with that tasty marinara meatball flavor. As is, they retain more of their meaty flavoring. Many may prefer the latter, but we tend to enjoy the former.
Perhaps the sauce serving was kept low to stay at that 280-calorie mark, but we would have gladly added 20 calories worth of sauce to make the consistency a bit better.
Aside from the sauce thing, there’s not much else to say about this dish. It’s a traditional spaghetti and meatballs combo that tastes more like the reheated version you made the second day rather than the initial batch. For such an easy meal with such a low calorie count, that’s not the worst thing in the world. But if you want a genuinely tasty pasta, we’d recommend something else. In fact, Healthy Choice has a Meatball Marinara that’s pretty incredible, and that one also hits that impressive 280-calorie mark.
As for the Spaghetti & Meatballs, though, we’d have preferred a dish with a little more sauce and a little less of that second-day, reheated consistency and flavor.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients of this frozen spaghetti dish, check out our package scan below.
