The Marie Callender’s Traditional Lasagna with Meat & Sauce Bowl isn’t as much of a traditional lasagna as the title would imply. Sure, all of the classic ingredients are here, from the wavy pasta to the tomato and beef sauce to the cottage cheese. Even with all that said, this is more of a pasta bowl than a true lasagna. It’s eaten from a bowl and it doesn’t need to be sliced to be served.
So how does the Traditional Lasagna with Meat & Sauce Bowl hold up against the classic sliced lasagna variety? Heck, how does it hold up against Marie Callender’s other pasta bowls? These are the burning questions that we know you all have, so we’re going to dig into this meal to find out.
But first, of course, we must cook it. Thankfully, this is your pretty standard frozen meal, as far as cooking goes. You’ll pop it into the microwave for three and a half minutes, give it a quick stir, then pop it back in for another minute or two (we found one minute to be plenty). That’s all there is to it (if you want to read the instructions straight off the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review).
Now, one of the ways to transform a lasagna into a lasagna bowl is to change the noodles. Instead of those big sheets of pasta, this comes in much smaller ruffled strips. It’s thinner than we were expecting it to be, which is the part that really breaks the lasagna illusion. The whole time we were eating this, our brains kept insisting these should be thicker, which made it feel a little strange to eat.
The sauce is pretty much what you’d expect. Flavor-wise, it’s on the acidic side, and consistency-wise it’s far too watery. Besides the soupy quality, this is a pretty average lasagna sauce. We’ve had better; we’ve had worse.
The beef makes an attempt to spice things up a bit — quite literally, as the beef here tastes strongly of spices. Well, we should clarify: It tastes strongly of spices in certain places. In others, it’s just your regular old beef. The box refers to the beef as “crumbles,” though it is balled a little bit. We think it’s probably more accurate to refer to this as tiny meatballs than as beef crumbles.
If you’re looking for a diet-friendly meal, this ain’t it. It contains 430 calories, which isn’t actually all that bad, though it’s well outside the range of what we’d call a diet food. With this meal, though, it’s the sodium that’s really the problem. 1,630 mg of sodium is nothing to scoff at. In fact, that’s more than double the average for a frozen meal. This is an absolute boatload of sodium! If you’re looking to avoid a ride on the sodium boat, you should probably skip this meal altogether.
The Marie Callender’s Traditional Lasagna with Meat & Sauce Bowl is a pretty average bowl of lasagna. There are some minor flaws, and there’s nothing to really make this stand out, but it’s still a lasagna. It’s hard to complain about a lasagna unless there’s something seriously wrong with it. Even so, we’d probably rather have the Slow Simmered Rigatoni Bolognese Bowl if we were going with a pasta bowl, and we’d much rather eat the Italiano Lasagna with Ricotta Cheese if we were to go with a standard lasagna. Still, as a basic bowl version of lasagna, this ain’t half bad.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen lasagna bowl, check out our package scans below.
