We love a good frozen ravioli here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, so when we spotted the Marie Callender’s Garden Tomato Four Cheese Ravioli Bowl, we thought it might make for a pretty tasty bowl of food. So we did what we always do when we encounter meals like this in the wild: We purchased it and brought it to the Freezer Meal Frenzy offices so we could do some experiments.
And be “do some experiments” we actually mean “eat some dinner.”
So today we’re checking out the Marie Callender’s Garden Tomato Four Cheese Ravioli Bowl in hopes of discovering yet another tasty bowl of ravioli.
But first, as always, we must cook it up. Thankfully, heating this up is not a complicated process. Simply toss it into the microwave, give it a quick stir, then toss it back in for a bit longer. This is no more complex than your average Lean Cuisine meal, as far as cooking goes. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions straight from the box, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Unfortunately, when we pulled this out of the microwave, our excitement faded a bit. As you can see in the image above, this meal is mostly sauce. We counted eight pieces of ravioli in the entire dish, and they were buried in the sauce.
Now, the tomato sauce isn’t bad, but it’s not super great either. It would be just an inoffensive sauce that gets the job done if there weren’t so darn much of it. Seriously, this is an absolute boatload of sauce!
The pieces of ravioli are pretty good though, They’re not amazing, but they do slap a ravioli craving upside the head. The shells have a nice soft consistency, and the filling is a lovely four-cheese blend. Yes, you’ll find ricotta, parmesan, mozzarella, and romano cheeses inside. If there were say, fifteen pieces of ravioli instead of eight, this would have been a pretty decent bowl of ravioli. In fact, there’s probably enough sauce here for that much ravioli. As is, this is kind of disappointing.
This is pretty low in calories but high in sodium. Calorie-cutters will be happy to see there are only 320 calories in this dish, making this close to a diet meal. Anyone trying to reduce their sodium intake, however, will run in terror from the 950 mg of sodium in this dish. That’s a lot, even for a frozen meal.
With the Marie Callender’s Garden Tomato Four Cheese Ravioli Bowl, Marie Callender’s was on their way to making a pretty decent dish. The problem is that they stopped somewhere along the way. Had they committed to making this a complete meal with enough ravioli to accommodate the sauce, we would have found this to be quite good. The dish as it actually exists, however, is a bit of a letdown.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scans below.
