Our interest in the Scott & Jon’s brand of frozen food began with their shrimp-filled options. These frozen meal makers have created a plethora of options for the shrimp-craving crowd, and many of them are quite good. Frozen shrimp meals seem difficult to do right, but Scott & Jon’s managed to make some truly craveable ones.
Of course, not every meal they make contains shrimp, and we’ve been slowly making our way through their non-shrimp options. We recently tried their take on mac and cheese, as well as their frozen Pad Thai. Today, we’re digging deeper into this line, with the Scott & Jon’s Pesto Penne with Vegetables.
Cooking this is as easy as can be. Cut a slit in the film, then pop the tray into the microwave for three and a half minutes. That’s all there is to it, pardner! Of course, you will certainly want to stir it before eating. (You can read the full cooking instructions straight off the box by scrolling down to the package scan at the bottom of this review.)
Now, let’s just get this out of the way immediately: If you don’t like pesto, you’re going to want to steer clear of this. This is just loaded with pesto flavor, which is powerful enough that it cuts through the potent blend of garlic and parmesan to be the primary flavor here. Pesto lovers will be in pesto heaven, but pesto deniers will have a hard time with this one.
The broccoli here is amazing. This stuff tastes super fresh, and it’s a really good complement to the potent flavors we mentioned in the previous paragraph. There are chunks of tomato here as well, and while they’re not quite as incredible as the broccoli, they do their job pretty well.
The noodles here are your basic penne noodles (as the title of the dish suggests). They’re perfectly fine, though they do end up just a tad dry and sticky, since there’s not a “wet” sauce here to cover them. If you can get some veggies onto your fork at the same time, the natural moisture of the vegetables mitigates this, but if you just grab a piece of pasta on its lonesome, it will be just a teeny bit dry.
This is a super diet-friendly meal (which is good because we’ve been eating some really not-diet-friendly foods lately!) With just 270 calories, you won’t have to spend a whole day at the gym to make yourself feel better about eating this. However, the sodium is just a tad high, at 790 mg.
The Scott & Jon’s Pesto Penne with Vegetables is incredibly rich. It’s definitely catered to veggie lovers (and pesto lovers), but if you’re in that category, you’ll probably really enjoy this. Our only complaint is that the pasta can be just the tiniest bit too dry in places, but that’s more of a nitpick, really. This is still a top-notch frozen meal.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal, check out our package scan below.
