Well, after the disaster with the Michelina Lasagna Meal I’d almost given up hope on a decent frozen dinner from that company. Several readers noted, however, that I might have bought the wrong TYPE of Michelina meal, as in the Lean Gourmet line. And indeed that seemed to be the case. Like I said I could care less about the calories.

Luckily, I’d only bought 3 of these meals (for the magnificent total of 3 dollars) as a test so I wouldn’t need to slog through all of them if they were really bad. The 2nd one I ate involved some Shrimp Scampi pasta which was actually quite good. Unfortunately, I was so hungry that day that I didn’t get to take pictures of that one before scarfing it down.

So this third frozen dinner is the Michelina Swedish Meatball meal. I really like meatballs in general, however they’re done. A lot of people actually get so called Swedish Meatballs at Ikea, funnily enough. I’ve had good experiences with the kind you buy from CostCo. A friend of mine makes this pretty good recipe with those CostCo meatballs along with ketchup, grape jelly, onions, and bell peppers in a crock pot. Not half bad.

You can also make your own meatballs, much cheaper. I like spaghetti with homemade meatballs quite a bit. I should probably just make my own, right? But in any case here’s what I thought of the frozen Swedish Meatball dinner.

I made this meal in the microwave again. One interesting thing about these “pasta” type frozen dinners, is that they actually have the noodles and the sauce separately in the dinner, and you’re instructed to mix it after they’ve cooked a bit. I think that’s a good idea, because it let’s the noodles cook correctly so they’re not overdone and let’s the sauce heat up correctly.

One thing about the sauce though, it tended to actually burn, even though I cooked it exactly like the package said. It tended to get burnt in the corners of the box, although when I mixed it up it didn’t taste burnt at all.

The sauce itself was actually a quite nice gravy. The noodles were decent - at least they weren’t overcooked and still had some bite. The meatballs were actually OK though the CostCo kind definitely kicked their ass. If you count them you can see that there are actually six small meatballs which is just OK I’d guess.

So the taste overall was fine. I think my biggest complaint again was that there is not enough of it. I was really hungry before eating this and I was still hungry afterwards. Since they’re a buck, you can afford to eat more than one; indeed an average guy would probably have to eat about three of these meals. At least. Maybe I need to investigate the “Hungry Man” type of meal, has anyone tried those? In any case, because it did taste pretty decent I gave it a better score.

Cheap Eats Score: 6/10