I love lasagna just like almost every red blooded American. The lasagna most of us enjoy in the USA is much different than what you might get in Italy. They make it with a wide variety of ingredients and sometimes it includes seafood. Generally, lasagna is just wide pasta noodles layered in a large baking pan with some type of sauce or something stuffed between the layers. Most of us think ground meat, cheese and tomato sauce.
The tagline on the front cover mentions something about creamy sauce with garlic, cheese and wine. So, I knew going in this wouldn’t be your usual lasagna and more towards the creamy spectrum of Italian foods. I didn’t expect it would be like a creamy, cheesy glacier. Let me continue… Trader Joe’s usually has a method or two for these frozen meals. Either you bake it or microwave it. If I can read the fine minds at Trader Joe’s HQ, the top method or preparation is the preferred method with better results and after that is the method that might be quicker but will not have the best outcome. Maybe I should’ve listened to them this time, but I didn’t have the time. The top method was to bake it for about 50 minutes in the oven, I went for the microwave method. Maybe that was my downfall.
Honestly, I don’t think anything could’ve saved this dish. When I took it out of the microwave, it looked like a lump of melted cheese and you could see the cheese and oil separating at the edges. It smelled really good. I could smell the cheese, wine and garlic and it smelled really good. I transferred it to a shallow bowl because I didn’t want to eat out of the paper box bowl that it came in. When I put it in the bowl, the cheese sauce slid off the top and formed a gloppy pool around one side.
I knew there would be problems when I tried to cut into it and it the noodles were hard?!?! Not so hard that you couldn’t cut into them, but hard enough I had to push through them. The bite I cut off left strands of melted cheese and oil connected to the main body of the lasagna as I lifted it to my mouth. Boy was this cheesy! Want a little cheese with your noodles! BTW, there is no way you could eat a whole one. I think it’s about 900 calories for the whole thing so you should split it with someone.
Back to the lasagna. Did you know that the word Scampi means Shrimp in Italian? I don’t know when we Americans started calling any Italian dish Shrimp Scampi. It’s like saying Shrimp Shrimp. Anyways… Instead of where’s the beef, this should be “where’s the shrimp?”. I could not find any. Actually I finally did, three tiny pieces of shrimp buried in all that cheese and oil. I expected way more shrimp and way less cheese and oil. All in all, it tasted OK, but the noodles were hard (I followed the cooking directions to a T). There was too much cheese and the I guess the shrimp got scared of all the cheese and swam away.
I would give this 3 out of 10 Bells. Don’t buy it unless you want a lot of oily, garlicky cheese.
