Review: Lean Cuisine Steak, Cheddar, and Mushroom Panini

I went to the store earlier this week to restock my Lean Cuisine arsenal, and found that they had come out with these new Panini sandwich meals. Since I was up for a little variety, I put one in the cart. I would have done more than one, but the only variety they had was the steak/cheddar/mushroom, and I didn't want to get multiple packages of the same thing in case I didn't like it.

Well, I tried it today, and it was better than I thought it would be.

Pros:

-It's darn tasty. I'm not a huge cheesesteak fan, generally, but this is a perfectly passable sandwich.

-That grilling tray actually works. The bread was crispy and had grill marks...it felt almost like the real thing.

-The mushrooms were surprisingly un-rubbery (unlike the ones in my Stouffer's garlic chicken pasta yesterday..ugh), and the cheese was decent.

Cons:

-At 300 calories and 9g of fat, it's one of the heavier choices on the LC product list. Its 730mg of sodium is a little high, also.

-It's sort of labor-intensive, and works better if you have utensils at your disposal. Here are the steps I had to take to cook and eat this thing:

1. Open box on one side.
2. Read directions and realize that I opened the box wrong.
3. Re-open box, using pull-tab and tearing open the top of the box at the perforations.
4. Remove meal from box.
5. Remove meal and grilling tray from plastic casing. (Scissors would have made this part much more pleasant. Their pull-apart adhesive must be designed by NASA, perhaps to hold the shuttle together during re-entry. Criminey.)
6. Flip the top of the box over the back, creating the cooking platform.
7. Carefully balance the open-face sandwich and grilling tray and slide it onto the cooking platform.
8. Realize that the cooking platform has obscured the cooking directions on the back of the box, which I had not read completely.
9. Tilt the sandwich slightly on the cooking platform to reveal how long to nuke the stupid thing, spilling more meat and cheese on the floor.
10. Place in microwave for 3 minutes.
11. Remove from microwave.
12. Attempt to pry sandwich from grilling tray with fingers.
13. Get fork and knife from caterer.
14. Chisel sandwich from grilling tray with fork and knife.
15. Put sandwich together.
16. Cut in half.
17. Enjoy. FINALLY.

Your experience may vary, of course, but by the end I was longing for a meal of the more open-vent-nuke-stir-eat variety.

-It's just the sandwich. I like to have a little something to go with my sandwich...chips, salad, whatever. So I'm using 6 points for the sandwich, and then also have to spend something for a side item to make it feel like a complete meal. In my case, my total meal was 11 points--sandwich(6), chips(4), and an orange(1). Still a small meal when compared to what I could get at any restaurant in this area, but nearly half of my daily points allowance nonetheless. I could have reduced that by getting a salad instead of bringing chips, but I had no cash today.

So, yeah. I give it a thumbs-up overall, and am looking forward to trying the other varieties (except the Southwest Chicken--I don't have the best of luck with LC's definition of "Southwest" anything).

The southwest one is actually one of the better ones. You should try it.