Romano's Macaroni Grill Restaurant Favorites Dinner Kits. Creamy Basil Parmesan Chicken & Pasta, Garlic & Herb Chicken Penne, Chicken Marsala With Linguine and Chicken Alfredo With Linguine. $4.79 for 8-ounce to 18.2-ounce box containing pasta, sauce and seasoning.
Bonnie: The casual Italian family restaurant Macaroni Grill has brought some of its dishes to supermarket shelves in the form of meal kits. To make them, just add a pound of chicken, some butter or oil and, in some cases, milk. If you want vegetables in your meal, you'll need to purchase them too.
So what do you get for your 5 bucks? Not much. About 5 ounces of pasta, less than half an ounce of grated cheese, about half an ounce of seasonings, and some sundry other packets of food (sun-dried tomatoes, tomatoes with mushrooms and onions, creamy sauce and cooking wine), along with lots of chemicals, which is typical of most boxed meals.
In this economy, your money can be much better spent on a pound of pasta, some cheese and a jar of your favorite pasta sauce.
Carolyn: I've never been to a Macaroni Grill restaurant, and if these new meal kits are representative of what is served there, I won't be going anytime soon. The look is upscale premium, but the food these make is too indulgent, too full of intensely flavored ingredients — in short, too much.
The milk you must add to the Chicken Alfredo With Linguine is supplemented by MG's shelf-stable creamy sauce and grated Parmesan and Romano cheese. The Creamy Basil Parmesan Chicken & Pasta has all this plus sun-dried tomatoes (or so much stuff that the basil taste gets lost). The one less indulgent offering, the Chicken Marsala With Linguini, produces an anemic, one-note sauce.
The supermarket frozen food case offers tastier, faster alternatives, such as Healthy Choice Chicken Margherita Cafe Steamer bowl, Stouffer's Rigatoni With Roasted White Meat Chicken in Basil Pesto Sauce and Putney Pasta's Chicken Alfredo Skillet.
Quaker Simple Harvest Chewy Multigrain Granola Bars. Dark Chocolate Chunk, Cinnamon Brown Sugar With Apples and Cranberries, and Honey Roasted Nut. $3.69 per 7.4-ounce box with six bars.
Bonnie: Simple Harvest multigrain cereals contain a serving of whole grains. I had hoped these new Simply Harvest Granola Bars would, too, but they provide only 10 to 12 grams, or just over half a serving. On the plus side, these are made with ingredients you would recognize. Each bar contains about 150 calories, 3 to 7.5 grams of fat (the high is the chocolate variety), 7 to 10 grams of sugar and 2 grams of fiber (from the oats and the added inulin), which is similar to many other granola bars.
Kashi TLC Chewy bars are also made with ingredients you recognize and contain 30 fewer calories per bar, 1 to 5 fewer grams of fat, and 2 more grams of fiber. The Cherry Dark Chocolate variety also contains 16 grams of whole grains, or about 1 serving. It's the granola bar I'd recommend.
Carolyn: There aren't too many hot cereals as tasty and indulgent as Quaker's 1-year-old multigrain Simple Harvest. In fact, I liked those instant hot cereals so much, they made my "top-10 products of the year" list just a few weeks back. These Simple Harvest snack bars are a lot more ordinary. In part, that's because they face lots more competition from Clif, Luna, Balance, etc., and because these bars stray further from the Simple Harvest cereal concept of healthy gourmet.
For instance, none of the Simple Harvest cereals feature candy, whereas the bars do. But the Simple Harvest Dark Chocolate Chunk bar doesn't contain enough chocolate to camouflage the brown rice/barley/wheat taste. The nut-filled Honey Roasted Nut is much better, and the Cinnamon Brown Sugar With Apples and Cranberries (which, given all its dried apple, would more aptly be called Apple Cinnamon) is better still.
As for nutrition and taste, these are a compromise between the smaller, sweet Quaker Chewy granola snack bars and natural, nutrition-focused Clif and Balance — and not, unfortunately, a portable re-creation of the wonderful Simple Harvest cereals.
Earthbound Farm Organic California Blend Salad. $3.99 per 4.9-ounce container.
Bonnie: There's almost nothing not to like about Earthbound Farm's new California Blend of organic baby spinach with dried blueberries and sliced almonds. A large (more than 2-cup) serving contains a mere 80 calories, 4.5 grams of fat from the almonds, and 9 grams of fiber, and is an excellent source of iron and vitamins A and C.
So what's the almost? It could use just a bit more almonds.
Carolyn: I agree with Bonnie that this is basically delicious. I do have a few minor issues, however.
One is that these are the biggest leaves of "baby" spinach I have ever seen (though they are richer and more flavorful, while being almost as tender as the small baby spinaches I have tried).
I also wonder why Earthbound Farm is calling this salad California, when the biggest crops of its most unusual ingredient (wild blueberries) come from Maine, and when the idea of a California spinach salad will remind most people of 2006's California spinach E. coli outbreak and recall.
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). Each week they critique three new food items. For previous columns, visit www.supermarketsampler.com, and for more food info and chances to win free products, visit www.biteofthebest.com. © Universal Press Syndicate