Lean Cuisine Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni

While frozen meals are not a regular part of my diet, I'm not immune to their convenience, and knowing that Lean Cuisine has offered some well-touted pastas, I decided to give their Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni a try. Lean Cuisine describes this as "stuffed rigatoni pasta filled with a creamy blend of ricotta, Romano and mozzarella cheeses tossed with orange and yellow carrots, zucchini and red peppers in a fire roasted tomato sauce with accents of oregano and basil."
I slitted, nuked, stirred, and re-nuked the bowl according to the package directions and was happy to see a good amount of vegetables floating in the sauce, along with a surprisingly generous topping of mozzarella cheese. The pasta looked like oblong ravioli rather than rigatoni, as they were sealed at the ends. I took a bite of a noodle with sauce, and it was actually - surprisingly - pretty good! The filling, while touting, "ricotta, Romano and mozzarella cheeses" tasted mostly like ricotta, but was creamy and tasty nonetheless. The "fire-roasted" tomato sauce is pretty mild - if you don't like an overly tomato flavor, it's great, though I'd prefer a bit more tomato punch. There was ample shredded carrots in the sauce, but only two or three chunks of tomato and zucchini. A few shredded yellow strips floated around with the carrots - I think they were bell peppers, but they could have been yellow carrots. Hey, I like carrots and all, but how about some mushrooms or broccoli or some other Italian vegetables? There's about eight noodles in the bowl, paired with a salad, made a pretty decent lunch, though wouldn't satisfy me for a dinner.
Each Lean Cuisine Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni provides 240 calories, 6 grams of total fat (9% of the daily value), 3 grams of saturated fat (15% of the DV), 660 mg sodium (27% DV), 12 grams of protein and 35 grams of carbohydrates which includes 4 grams of fiber and 10 grams of sugars.


As someone who is on Weight Watchers, I put a lot of thought (read: A LOT OF THOUGHT) into my food choices. Points dominate my daily existence so I am always looking for maximum satisfaction for minimum points…
Lean Cuisine says:Stuffed rigatoni pasta filled with a creamy blend of ricotta, romano and mozzerella cheeses tossed with orange and yellow carrots, zucchini and red peppers in a fire roasted tomato sauce with accents of oregano and basil.
Gwen says: As someone who is on Weight Watchers, I put a lot of thought (read: A LOT OF THOUGHT) into my food choices. Points dominate my daily existence so I am always looking for maximum satisfaction for minimum points. This can be a hard find with many frozen meals, but I think I’ve found a winner with Lean Cuisine’s Three Cheese Stuffed Rigatoni bowl. First, I’ve never heard of a yellow carrot: I thought they were yellow peppers until I read the box. Regardless of that vegetable image discrepancy they tasted great and on a whole, the vegetable to bowl ratio was impressive. There were a great deal of carrots and peppers, a little less zucchini but still a happy serving. They weren’t mushy and didn’t taste like they were picked ages ago. These veggies maintained some enjoyably fresh crispness. Sometimes frozen meal vegetables become lost in the sauce, but that was not the case with this meal. I couldn’t pick out the special fire roasted taste of the sauce, but it served its purpose in the meal. The stuffed rigatoni, which was essentially ravioli, was plentiful (for a microwave lunch bowl) and the three cheese blend inside each rigatoni was not soggy or waterlogged but tasty, I could even differentiate between the three cheeses. Overall I am very pleased with this meal choice and will continue to throw it into the meal rotation (this is my second time eating the meal and it was equally satisfying last time.)
A note to WW participants: Lean Cuisine includes information for the Weight Watchers Winning Points program on their boxes, however that is not the current program being marketed at Weight Watcher meetings or online. Now the program is called TurnAround Points. I don’t know if it really changed anything, but according to my points finder slide, this meal is on the line between 4 and 5 points, so I go up for the sake of a little overestimating is better than underestimating. But still, for 5 points for a filling frozen meal, I am happy.