When I bought all the sale priced Lean Cuisine meals, I was excited to try the meat loaf and mashed potatoes! I love meat loaf! I love mashed potatoes. But looking at the 7 grams of fat, I was hesitant to get too many. I grabbed a few of them though.
I brought several Lean Cuisine meals with me to work, and I tried the Meatloaf With Gravy & Whipped Potatoes for lunch. It has 250 total calories, with 7 grams of fat which make up 24% of the total calories. That’s king of high. Weight Watchers counts this as 5 Points. It took 6 minutes of microwave time, with no steps during cooking. How was it? I was kind of dissapointed. The meatloaf was kind of bland, and was the mash potatoes. I had eaten most of the mashed potatoes when it struck me that I could have sprinkled some Molly McButter on them. Oh well. If it had tasted really good, I might have put up with the 24% fat calorie percentage. But I doubt I will buy more of this one.
Last Friday I went back to the grocery store, and loaded up on Lean Cuisine meals while they were still on sale. I skipped the ones that were regularly prices at $2.29, and went for the ones that were regularly $3.19. There weren’t too many of those left, but grabbed all of the ones I was interested in. Then I went after the ones that were regularly prices at $2.99. There was a great selection of these. I tried to grab at least one or two of each. Even then I didn’t manage to get all of them. I skipped some of the ones that had a higher amount of fat in them, and went for the ones with the lowest amount of fat. I need to take a calculator so I calculate out the percentage of fat calories.
Anyway, this morning for breakfast I ate the Lean Cuisine Chicken Cabonara (roasted chicken tenderloins with bacon & mushrooms over linguine). It was regularly priced ay $2.99. So a $1.66 was a great price. I hesitated on this one because of the 7 grams of fat. But I love spaghetti carbonara! The total calories were 270, with 7 grams of fat or 60 fat calories making up about 22% of the total calories. It took 5 minutes of microwave time. Just had to stir it when it was done cooking. It smelled great when cooking. Then it tasted great. It doesn’t have the texture of actual spaghetti carbonara, and the taste is a little different. But it is a very good. I will probably eat more of these every once in a while. But due to the higher fat calorie percentage, I will probably limit how often. But it was really good!
I was trying to decide what to make for dinner last night. I had gone through a couple cook books, Weight Watchers Take Out Tonight, and Low Fat In Nothing Flat. I couldn’t decide. I took the Low Fat In Nothing Flat cookbook with me when I went to karate class, with plans of stopping at the grocery store on my way home. And that’s what I did. I still hadn’t decided. So I sat in the store parking lot, thumbing through the cookbook and settled on Steamed Mussels With Bell Peppers. I went it, did my shopping, and bought all the stuff that I needed.
I am not sure I am going to mess with mussels again. They are a little work heavy. I had to scrub all of the mussels one by one. And it took a little while for 4 dozen mussels. And that was on top of dicing a red pepper, a green pepper, and onion, and mincing the garlic. I also had to chop the dried-tomato bits. Instead of melting a tablespoon of reduced calorie margarine in the skillet, I used butter flavored olive oil spreay. This work fine, and I had that much less fat in what was already a low fat meal.
The mussels were okay. It was a lot less messy than the mussels with marinara recipe that I tried a couple weeks ago. So we ate the clams, and ate all the veggies and broth stuff. It was okay. I don’t think I will make it again. I think I might look for more clam recipes that use canned clams. Those are much easier!