Review: Buitoni Light Four Cheese Ravioli

• I Paid: ~ $4.00 (with a coupon) at Giant
• Description: Light Four Cheese Ravioli

I have to admit I had a somewhat random reason for buying these, since I normally never buy these refridgerated pastas (too expensive for what they are, in my opinion). In a recent issue of Real Simple magazine, there was an ad for Buitoni, that said you can get a pair of bamboo pasta/salad servers with proof of purchase of a Buitoni product. Let's not pretend to be so surprised that I fell for an obvious marketing schtick, shall we? (Also, this explains why I don't know the exact price of the pasta- I had to send in the receipt as my proof of purchase.)

Since I had to get one anyway, I figured I'd try out the only "Light" version they had available at Giant. The four cheeses, according to the nutritional info, are: Cottage Cheese, Ricotta Cheese, Romano Cheese, and Fontina Cheese. Could I have told you that just from eating these? No freakin' way.

These alleged "four" cheese pillows just need to be boiled for 7-9 minutes. While that was going I figured I'd make the sauce a little interesting at least and cooked some fresh minced garlic, chopped Amish farm sausage, chopped bell pepper, and some spices to a jarred tomato sauce. Once the pasta seemed about done I strained it and added it to the sauce mixture.

Final verdict? These weren't too shabby, especially for 1/2 the fat of Buitoni's regular ravioli. If you're going to be eating these anyway, I figure it's better to get the ones slightly better for you, since these don't taste particularly "low-fat" or anything. It's a good item to have on hand when you want a quick meal. Just by themselves they are pretty bland (again, with the alleged "four" cheeses which really tastes like one cheese square), so I would definitely recommend a strong sauce to go with these. The serving size seemed off to me, but maybe they're thinking like large dinner portions (says it'll make 2.5 servings). It made me 4 servings, which I'll have to eat for consecutive meals since I'm going away this weekend.

More importantly, I better be getting my bamboo salad/pasta servers soon, Mr. Buitoni.