| | |  | Pasta & Noodle Dishes | Home » » » Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers, Ziti & Meat Sauce, 6.95-Ounce Bowls (Pack of 6) | | | | | | | Description: | | Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers provide a quick, fresh and Healthy meal solution. Each unit contains everything necessary to cook, strain, and mix a complete meal in 5 minutes or less.รกรก Fresh Mixers can be conveniently stored in your pantry or desk as no ref | | | Features: | |
• A complete meal solution
• Cook the ziti pasta in the steamer/strainer provided, and heat the meat marinara sauce then mix for a fresh, easy and fast bowl of pasta!
• Fresh Mixers Ziti and Meat Sauce will please those looking for a quick tasty pasta meal
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 12.0 inches | | Product Width:
| 6.0 inches | | Product Height:
| 6.0 inches | | Product Weight:
| 3.9 pounds | | Package Length:
| 15.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 5.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 3.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 44 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 44 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 13 found the following review helpful:
Convenient, tangy and mildly spicy, but not too "green"Oct 24, 2008
By Alan Holyoak
Some engineer somewhere had fun with this one!
Here's how you can be eating your meal inside 5 mins - at least how it worked for me:
1) Pull the plastic film off of the top of the container
2) Peel away the plastic wrapping that holds the strainer lid in place
3) Remove the inner plastic bowl that contains the meat sauce, and set the meat sauce aside for the moment
4) Add just enough water to the uncooked pasta so that the water level reaches the fill line (the fill line is a little tough to see at first)
5) Shake the pasta so that it's all submerged in the water
6) Replace the strainer top and then cook the pasta in a microwave on high for 3 mins 30 secs
7) While the pasta is cooking, open a corner of the meat sauce
8) When the pasta is done, remove it from the microwave and let it sit while you warm up the meat sauce for 30 secs on high.
9) While the meat sauce is warming up, drain any remaining water from the pasta and remove the strainer lid.
10) As soon as the sauce is done open the meat sauce covering the rest of the way, pour it over the pasta, stir, and eat!
Wow! That was pretty convenient, and it actually worked as advertised! It wasn't even too hot to carry!
OK, what about the food?
To start with I'm just a regular guy who usually makes my lunches of the previous night's family dinner left-overs...i.e., not a gourmet, but not taste-dead either...
I was pleased to find that the pasta cooked well, but be advised that if you don't shake the pasta down before you cook it you might find a piece here and there that still has hard spots in it. There was plenty of sauce...no skimping on sauce volume, and the portion size was great for lunchtime. I wasn't stuffed when I was done, but I wasn't still hungry either.
The meat sauce was tangy and mildly spicy. The meat sauce contained small chunks of beef (i.e., looked like hamburger), and you could tell what it was if you looked closely. The pasta and sauce consistency was good, and I enjoyed the entire meal. Be advised that the sauce contains onion and garlic. If you know you have an important meeting or date later on, you will probably want to pack some mints. Say, that would be a great addition...an after-meal mint included with each meal that you can use to fight post-meal garlic breath.
If you like the combination of convenience and pasta, this may well an excellent choice for you.
If you are also environmentally conscious, though, you should probably think twice about this unit. Once you are done with your meal there's really not much you can do with the packaging...just recycle it. If, however, the packaging included a solid lid rather than just the strainer lid, the main container could be washed and then reused as a food storage container...alas, that is not the case.
Anyway, I thought the food was flavorful, the portion was adequate, and the convenience excellent. Environmental challenges drop the rating by a star though.
Lastly, you'll have to determine whether the per unit cost makes this a good deal for you.
4 stars
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Convenient and tastyOct 23, 2008
By Ryan Hennessy
I was not expecting much from this, a disposable package of self-boiling pasta with a bag of meat sauce. There should be no way it can work. But it does! You fill cover the slightly oily pasta with water, leave on the drainer top, microwave it for 3 minutes, drain it, heat the sauce, and mix it all up. And amazingly, it tasted good! Normally I can't stand this zero-effort lazy style of cooking microwaved meals, but this was actually really tasty. I would not make this a part of my regular routine because of the price, but I can imagine people who would.
I have to take issue with the packaging, though. I am giving this four stars because each serving is individually packaged, and none of it is recycleable. The bulk of what you are buying is packaging, and it all gets thrown away.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Yummy "Emergency" FoodOct 23, 2008
By Karen Woodworth Roman
"Happy Librarian"
Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers, Ziti & Meat Sauce is a very convenient food to keep on hand. It would be great to keep in your desk at work, dorm room, or take on a trip. The packaging is well designed and even has a lift tab to make it easier to get the sauce package out. The plastic pieces are Number 5, which is recyclable in my town. The instructions are easy to follow and simple. Put water in to the line with the noodles and cook in the microwave for 3.5 mins and drain noodle. Next heat the sauce for 30 seconds and pour over the noodles. Mix and eat. The taste is very fresh and certainly better than leftovers. There are 340 calories per single serving package. The ingredient list is not too long and almost entirely recognizable. The sauce is pleasantly spicy. I would not make this at home, but it is a great convenience food for places that lack refrigeration or cooking facilities.
14 of 19 found the following review helpful:
 Probably destined for Big Lots (all the details here)Oct 23, 2008
By Patrick W. Crabtree
"The Old Grottomaster"
I don't want to be over-negative here -- this product will definitely meet the specific needs of some folks such as those who have little time or, college students who live by microwave cooking. But for the average consumer, this product has some clear drawbacks. There are five facets to my evaluation: ease of preparation, flavor, health aspects/portion size, environmental concerns, and storage, (I'm not including price, which people can weigh for themselves) so I'll enumerate my observations here:
1. Preparing the dish is a bit of a pain, compared to the Healthy Choice frozen dinners. It's essentially a five-step process, although I did find it necessary to additionally microwave the "finished" dish for an extra 30 seconds. I found it difficult to read the instructions on the side and on the top due to the tiny font size, but young people will probably not experience this problem. Microwaving the sauce can generate a tiny mess because you pull back a corner of the packet to allow steam to escape and mine bubbled out slightly. So, I did have to go back and wipe out the microwave with a damp rag. The water fill line is lightly stamped into the clear plastic and is near impossible to see initially -- you really have to look for it (on each end). The manufacturer would have benefited the consumer by putting larger font instructions on a removable card on the top so that one could just stick it under a refrigerator magnet to see what to do at each step; however, once you've prepared this dish the first time, it would be easy to do a second time without instructions.
2. My wife and I both tried the product and we came to essentially the same conclusion... it's not nearly as tasty as the Healthy Choice frozen dinners, which we like very much. The pasta comes out remarkably well, au dente, very tasty. Of course, "taste" is very subjective and we are pretty discriminating so I'll just say this: if you think that McDonald's hamburgers taste pretty good, you'll probably be okay with the taste of this dish. With the sauce, the dish has a fennel-Italian sausage ambiance and it's not at all bland. I'm not a vegetarian but, honestly, I think they'd have been better off to go with a meatless marinara sauce for broader appeal and better flavor.
3. The product (entire dish) has 340 calories, 6 grams of fat, and 2 grams of saturated fat. The dry weight is 6.95 ounces. In terms of portion size, I weigh 280 pounds and I'm a big eater -- the portion size was plenty large enough for me and the meal was hearty to the degree that I was not hungry again an hour later.
4. Environmentally, this baby is a bit of a nightmare. While the plastics are mostly of the recyclable type, most people who typically recycle plastic beverage bottles are probably not going to recycle this -- I didn't bother (even though I recycle a LOT of plastics, glass, and paper) because it takes more hot water to wash/rinse out the two plastic bowls and the lid than the plastic is worth -- in other words, in terms of energy use, this packaging is a loser. Unfortunately, I can see no other way to set it up -- the manufacturer has already reduced the necessary components to the least number possible.
5. The best aspect of this product is that it's very convenient to store, no refrigeration required, and the bowls stack nicely. The manufacturer's "use by" date extends for about a year, although I suspect that it would keep even longer than that under ideal dry storage conditions.
To summarize, you could slightly improve the flavor of this dish (which would also boost the calories and the fat content) by sprinkling some freshly grated Parmesan cheese over the top of it. But the bottom line is this... even though it would take longer, I would much prefer boiling a little of my own pasta and using some canned spaghetti sauce, warmed in the microwave, OR, I would recommend buying the Healthy Choice frozen dinners which are much more convenient to prepare and tastes remarkably superior to this product.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Fast and tasty meal.Oct 22, 2008
By shirlan
"Shirley Diederich"
Healthy Choice has a winner in this new idea of a fast food meal. I tried the Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers in the Ziti and meat sauce flavor. This is really a neat product. It can be stored in the pantry, no refrigeration needed. When ready to eat at home or office, you just open the package, which contains the ziti in a microwavable bowl with strainer, sauce in separate package. Could not be easier to prepare. Just add water to fill line over Ziti, cook 3 and 1/2 minutes in mcrowave, strain and add meat sauce. The directions say to heat 30 seconds after adding sauce but I did not need to do this because the room temperature sauce on hot ziti made it just the temperature I like for eating.The sauce is meaty and flavorful and the ziti just the texture I like.I think this product will be a winner in the Healthy Choice food line.I use a lot of Healthy Choice products but this is my favorite so far.
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