Pillsbury Ready to Bake! Sugar Free Chocolate Chip Cookies. $3.49 per 10.8-ounce tray yielding 12 cookies.
Bonnie: As someone who dislikes the aftertaste of Splenda, I was not looking forward to tasting Pillsbury's new Splenda-sweetened Ready to Bake! Sugar Free Chocolate Chip Cookies. Surprisingly, hot from the oven, these did not taste as bad as I expected. When cooled, though, the cookies have a horrid uncookie-like texture that even friends who like Splenda-sweetened foods didn't like.
Considering that and the fact that one cookie saves you a mere 30 calories and 2 grams of fat, while cheating you of lots of satisfaction, I really couldn't recommend them.
Carolyn: The good news about these new cookies is that the taste is no giveaway that these are sugar-free. They taste much better, for instance, than the brownies I made from scratch with Splenda (half-sugar, half-Splenda) Sugar Blend for Baking.
On the other hand, these bake up fairly bizarrely. The dough neither puffs nor spreads, only sits there in the oven, gradually darkening like a seashore sunbather. They also have a stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth dryness similar to peanut butter.
In sum, while these aren't bad, they're also not the treat that cookies should be.
Lean Cuisine Spa Cuisine. Salmon With Basil, Pork With Cherry Sauce, Rosemary Chicken, Chicken Pecan, Lemongrass Chicken, Grilled Chicken in Peanut Sauce, Lemon Chicken and Chicken Mediterranean. $2.79 per 8.25- to 10.5-ounce frozen entree.
Bonnie: Spa Cuisine is a paradigm of what's to come to market this year with the government's new recommendation to eat three servings of whole grains a day. Each of these entrees offers whole grains in the form of whole wheat pastas and brown rice. Consequently, all contain a respectable 2 to 5 grams of fiber, although not more than other calorie-comparable frozen entrees.
I found the taste acceptable for most of these, but the Salmon With Basil and the uniquely flavored Lemongrass Chicken were delicious, unlike other frozen dinners I've had to test over the years. Yes, Carolyn, believe it or not, I actually did enjoy eating a couple of these.
Carolyn: I'm sure Stouffer's meant to entice eaters with its new Spa Cuisine name and antiseptic blue and white packaging. But it alarmed me. To me, spa means small portions of food that look better than they taste. And what exactly is the back-of-the-box picture of the woman with the cucumber slices on her eyes trying to say? That the food would be better worn than eaten?
Never fear. These are merely Stouffer's Cafe Classics-style meals made with whole grains, and so are not nearly as bad as I expected. In fact, three of the eight (Chicken Mediterranean, Lemon Chicken and Chicken in Peanut Sauce) are just good old Cafe Classic dishes redone with brown rice and whole wheat pasta, which hardly hurts their taste at all.
Only the skimpily portioned and timidly flavored Chicken Pecan and Rosemary Chicken are total passes. Although pork and salmon are a novelty in frozen entrees, they taste disappointingly indistinctive in their respective entrees, but their sauces are delicious. The basil is the same strongly flavored creamy sauce used in Lean Cuisine's Basil Chicken; the cherry sauce is sweet and sophisticated — Burgundy wine being only one of its half-dozen interesting ingredients.
But the Lemongrass Chicken is Spa Cuisine's one true star, shining so bright that even Bonnie was able to see it! It features a plethora of unusual veggies (baby corn, yellow carrots, spinach) and a surprisingly thick, unusual and authentic-tasting sauce. Like Lean Cuisine Cafe Classics' Orange Beef, it bests the usual Asian takeout in taste, price and healthfulness — in short, in every way.
McCormick Grinders. Pizza Seasoning and Garlic Pepper. $2.49 per .92- to 1.23-ounce grinder.
Bonnie: I love McCormick's herbs and spices, and its single-salt and single-pepper grinders, but I'm not a fan of the mixed-ingredient grinders. Each of these non-refillable bottles contains dehydrated garlic, red and green bell peppers, and other things that you grind as you add it to your food.
I prefer creating my own herb and spice blends. For instance, I would more likely season my pizza with hot red pepper flakes and oregano instead of the garlic, onion and bell peppers McCormick uses. But if you enjoy a strong garlic flavor, you might try these.
Carolyn: Herb and spice flavors should be fresher if you grind them just before you eat them. That's the concept behind these McCormick grinder blends. The garlic flavor in both is quite strong, but it's hard to say whether that's because of the amount of garlic or the grinding.
The Garlic Pepper offers a lot more versatility and has a much greater potential market than the Pizza Seasoning. I had a hard time figuring out who would buy that one. Not people who make their own pizza from scratch and either know what they're doing or are following a recipe, and not people like me, who are quite happy with their favorite takeout and frozen pizzas.
That leaves a potential small number of people living in Italian-American-bereft parts of our country where takeout pizza is so uninspired that it would be improved by a few grindings of McCormick oregano and garlic. These people have my deepest sympathies.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods That Changed the Way We Eat (Quirk). © Universal Press Syndicate