It’s been a while since we reviewed a Lean Cuisine meal here at Freezer Meal Frenzy (apparently, it’s been almost a year), so we decided to get back on that horse today, with the Lean Cuisine Shrimp Alfredo Bowl. Now, when we actually started working on this review, we realized we’d already reviewed this same meal in the past, back when it was advertised as having “20% More” food in it. But we decided to whip up a fresh review anyway, since the “20% More” thing is no longer on the packaging.
And also, if it seems weird that we might have forgotten that we’d reviewed something, keep in mind that we’ve been doing this since 2016, and we’ve published almost 2,000 reviews at this point. If you create enough content for the web, then eventually you just start forgetting some of the less-memorable things you’ve posted. We wish it weren’t so — we would love to be blessed with super-memories — but that’s just not how human brains work normally.
Anyway, cooking this is super-duper simple. Just take the bowl out of the package, cut a slit in the film, then toss it into the microwave for three minutes. Once that’s done, give it a quick stir, then nuke it for two more minutes. That’s about as simple as a frozen meal gets. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the back of the box, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Now, we did enjoy this the last time we reviewed it, so we went into this particular review with some optimism.
We did point out in our previous review that the sauce ends up runnier than we’d like, but it still has a decent flavor. It’s certainly not the best alfredo sauce we’ve ever had (it doesn’t hold a candle to Stouffer’s take), and it’s maybe a little bit too garlicky, but it still suits this meal quite well.
The part of this meal we were the most excited to return to, of course, is the shrimp. This stuff is even better than we were expecting. No, it’s no match for Scott & Jon’s, a frozen food maker that seems to specialize in shrimp-based dishes, but it’s decently sized, has a good flavor, and even has a bit of snap when you bite into it. Our biggest complaint is that we only found three pieces of shrimp in this entire meal — we would have loved more of it!
To round out the flavor, you’ve got some veggies. Most of that is broccoli, and the portion here is pretty good. This doesn’t end up super soggy, which can be a problem with broccoli in frozen meals, and it retains a decent amount of flavor throughout the cooking process. There are also red peppers mixed in, but they’re not super well-represented here — we found maybe four small pieces of diced red pepper in our meal.
This contains 320 calories and 830 mg of sodium. While the calorie count is wonderfully low, the sodium level is a bit higher than we’d like. We typically prefer our frozen meals to have around 700 mg at most, and even that is a lot compared with a lot of non-frozen food options. Still, this is an appealing dish for calorie-counters specifically.
The Lean Cuisine Shrimp Alfredo Bowl is a pretty decent low-calorie dish of microwavable pasta. Is it the best frozen meal in the world? Of course not, and we’ve even mentioned some other dishes we prefer to this one in this review. That said, this still makes for a good lunch for the calorie-counting crowd.
You can learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen meal by checking out the package scans below.
