Some of Lean Cuisine’s best dishes are their pastas. For example, the Spicy Penne Arrabbiata is a favorite of ours, and the Shrimp & Angel Hair Pasta is surprisingly tasty for how low it is in calories. So finding Lean Cuisine pastas we haven’t yet tried here at Freezer Meal Frenzy tends to be a joyful experience. Unfortunately, our experience with the Lean Cuisine Spinach Artichoke Linguine wasn’t joyful at all.
It didn’t start off that bad. This meal is simple enough to cook — just pop it into the microwave for three minutes, give it a stir, and pop it back in for another minute and a half. It’s pretty simple.
Yet when we pulled it out of the microwave, we simply weren’t impressed. And that’s a real bummer, because look at how good it looks:
This frozen meal’s real sin is that it just doesn’t have any flavor. A rich, creamy alfredo sauce would have elevated this to something worth eating. The sauce here, however, is thin and bland.
Lean Cuisine tries to make up for this by adding heaps of spinach and artichokes. Normally, we would applaud this decision, but here we’re just not fans. Once again, the quality of the ingredients causes the whole meal to suffer.
The spinach is a bit slimy, and there are way too many stems here. Those stems tend to creep up on you and then lodge themselves in your throat when you don’t expect it. And the artichokes are of the bottom-of-the-barrel variety. They have a rough skin that causes a similar problem to the spinach stems — pieces that aren’t as tender as they should be get jammed in your throat when you’re trying to swallow.
This meal contains 310 calories, so at least it lives up to the “Lean” portion of “Lean Cuisine.” It’s really close to being a diet meal in that respect. The sodium is ever-so-slightly lower than your average frozen meal, at 630 mg, so that’s a plus as well.
So the Lean Cuisine Spinach Artichoke Linguine is a potentially good idea that doesn’t quite work out. We love the concept, yet the low-quality ingredients do it a disservice on pretty much every level. If you want to try a better artichoke-based dish from Lean Cuisine, check out their Spinach Artichoke Ravioli instead.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Lean Cuisine linguine, check out our package scans below.
