Dr. Gourmet's Food Reviews

Weight Watchers Smart Ones Broccoli and Cheddar Roasted Potatoes

Broccoli and Cheddar Roasted Potatoes and Chicken Quesadilla

A lot of my patients tell me that they take frozen meals to work with them for lunch. I do see that this is a great alternative to eating fast food. Not only is it cheaper (you can spend a lot of money eating out) but the planning puts you in control of what you’re eating. This week we chose two frozen meals that mimic what you might get if you did have fast food for lunch.

The Weight Watchers Smart Ones Broccoli and Cheddar Roasted Potatoes smell like a baked potato when it is almost finished in the microwave. This was certainly encouraging and the result is not disappointing. Small chunks of pre-roasted potato mixed with pretty crisp broccoli are topped with a cheddar cheese sauce. Simple.

And it’s pretty darn good. Hey, I know that this is Dr. Gourmet but you know there’s just some simple things that taste good. Like potatoes with broccoli topped with cheddar cheese sauce. And Weight Watchers makes it work.

This comes in at only 220 calories, 6 grams of fat, 480 mg sodium and best of all it has 5 grams of fiber. Try to not let the amazingly long list of ingredients dismay you too much -- this is, after all, processed food and Weight Watchers is not Kashi. The drawback is that all those ingredients leave the slight aftertaste of processed food.

As readers of this column know we seldom hit a home run here at Dr. Gourmet with reviews. The most interesting thing to me is that a company like Weight Watchers can get it so right as with the Broccoli and Cheddar Potatoes and then miss so wide of the mark with other products. You wonder if they had a really bad hangover and said “well that tastes fine but I really can’t taste anything today because I drank too much last night.”

A good example of this hangover theory is the Chicken and Cheese Quesadilla. You might be better off going to Taco Bell (do understand that I believe Taco Bell to be the temple of everything awful about processed food).

These quesadillas come with the little foil bottomed cardboard cooking sheets that are meant to brown the tortilla. They don’t but I am not sure that it would matter. The flour tortillas are bland and pasty and inside is a cheesy goo that might have chicken in it somewhere. No spice, no texture, no flavor -- no way!

Stick with the Potatoes and Broccoli for lunch -- you’ll be glad you did.

Reviewed: April 25, 2008