Luckily for me, my mother thought a crockpot was a bridge too far. I think she owned one, but it was a mysterious machine for her. She preferred to destroy food hands on, not in a time released fashion.
5 Likes
OMG! The Mexican ones! Best if you PURPOSELY burned them a bit and scrapped off the burned bits of the alleged “enchilada” and ate it with the gray beans and rice. MMMMmmm. I lived on those things when I was around 10-11 in the summer. Mom couldn’t be bothered to cook.
3 Likes
Right on Cedar. I still order that combination at restaurants: 1 cheese enchilada, 1 beef enchilada, mix the sauce, beans, and rice together.
3 Likes
Powdered real butter is surprisingly tasty, and works well in instant mashed potatoes (and other such mixes).
I used to turn up my nose at instant mashed potatoes until I saw Julia Child recommending it on her show. We’ve been buying this brand (when they have it at Costco), it is remarkably good for the genre.
2 Likes
I’ve had most of them at one point or another. And “surprisingly tasty” “you can do worse” and “tasted fine” aren’t substitutes for good. They’ll do in a pinch (camping, survival bunker, drunken cookery), and have their uses. But I’m not buying for a second that they’re genuinely good, or an in any way approach the real thing. Go ahead and like em anyway for what they are. I like plenty of things that are kind of gross or lame in spite of their problems, like stove top stuffing. But real mash potatoes aren’t all that hard to time consuming to make. Real stuffing requires me to cook a whole bird of some kind. And I don’t always want an entire damn chicken at 3am.
1 Like
OK, I’ll up my rating. If it wasn’t for the texture (a bit creamy for my taste) I would prefer these to many made-from-scratch mashed potatoes I’ve had over the years.
I roast my own coffee on occasion, but I think the preroasted beans I buy from microroasters are every bit “the real thing.” If the coffee beans contained something other than coffee, or these potatoes something other than potatoes (OK, they also have butter and salt and peels) then that would be something else again.
BTW, with stuffing you can put the ingredients in the bottom of a Dutch oven, layer it with some chicken pieces, and bake, and I would say the product is pretty much the same without needing the whole bird.
3 Likes
The analogue wouldn’t be with beans some one else roasted. That’s like getting properly made mashed potatoes from a restaurant. And I’ve got no problem with that. The analogue is with an instant coffee. A product that has already been prepared, then dehydrated. Volatile compounds vent off, changes take place to things like starch, and the whole shebang is exposed to a shit ton more oxidation. Which means there’s less flavor in there.
Well aware. But it still sticks me with a bunch of meat I don’t plan to eat during off hours self pity and stuffing binges. Basically what you’re getting is a more stuffing forward ratio of meat to meat soaked bread. Also I often find that since the fat has no where to drain to the results end up disconcertingly greasy. You can solve that by sticking to boneless skinless breasts (the tofu of the meat world), or trimming as much of the fat of as you can. But sometimes there’s no preventing it.
1 Like
My wife has attempted brownie-from-a-box mix twice in the past week. First one came out very much under-cooked, even once it cooled. So she put it back in the oven the next day for… some… time. Result: dried out, nearly rock-hard brownie candy. I ate some of it; it had a certain charm. I’m not proud.
Second attempt: very much under-cooked again. Instead of re-cooking, we’ve just cut it into random pieces and wait for the edges to dry out enough to eat. Well, at least be firmed-up enough to be liftable out of the pan.
She cooks exactly per the instructions. Box sez 20 minutes @400, that’s exactly what it gets. Still liquid in the center? Nope, it was in 20 minutes @ 400, it’s done!
She cooks pretty well otherwise. Something about brownies from a box though…
5 Likes
My dad made breakfast every weekday morning. Mom made dinner every night. I don’t think I had a tv dinner until microwaves came out (and I was born in 68). I realized after I went off to college that, while my mom was a truly great baker, she really wasn’t all that great a cook. I can still remember the epiphany I experienced when I discovered pork chops, when cooked properly, did not have the texture of shoe leather and did not taste like cardboard. Basically, my mom burned everything. She came from a school of cooking that felt food wasn’t safe to eat unless it had been cooked at the maximum temperature for at least an hour. I finally told her I liked my steaks rare to medium rare, but she refused to cook them that way when I went home to visit. She did, however, allow me to pull my steak off the grill when I wanted. She just refused to be a party to what she was sure was going to be my untimely death from consuming undercooked meat.
7 Likes
I like how the main selling point is the weight of the meal.
This food is terrible, but at least there’s plenty of it!
7 Likes
I loved the fried chicken too, and hadn’t remembered until I read your post. These are still a thing here in Canada, I think I’ll get one tomorrow just to see how that chicken tastes.
2 Likes
Holy crap, we had one of those exact same ones! Inherited from a next-door neighbor who died with no next-of-kin, IIRC. The sadness emanating from it was palpable.
3 Likes
I feel like fried chicken is one of the few things that comes off reasonably well in these sorts of things. That and things like pot pie (which others have mentioned). Some of those pot pies are in fact down right good.
4 Likes
Three years in a row, I paddled the Bowron Lakes in BC with my scout troop. We always brought as many cans of spray cheeze and sleeves of crackers as the canoes could handle.
That shit is dynamite. Binds you up like you wouldn’t believe so you don’t have to even worry about the literal crawling horror of certain outhouses. Calorific as all getout and as long as you had plenty of water, you could snack on them all day and not exactly run out of energy.
It also didn’t hurt that the “sharp cheddar” was so sour you didn’t even notice the taste of the 98% DEET balm seeping out of your skin onto your food.
Also: whatever happened to that 98% DEET balm? That stuff was magic too. Apply it once before heading out on the lakes and five days later skeeters are still dying as they land on you. The metallic taste takes a few weeks to go away though.
9 Likes
Well, if people can make new reviews of brutalist architecture (sometimes nicely overgrown) and crowdsource nondisparagement agreements for vindaloo, I guess you can do TV Dinners. Totes glad we missed the double down pivot with ‘Are you getting enough aluminum in your diet?’ Thanks for your service, MREs.
Only IoTs will tell if the next industrial takeaway side-eyes us and starts adding Tabasco, baking soda and aloe to everything by turns.
17 Likes
Are you ok, this almost makes sense?
13 Likes
I didn’t have all that many microwave/tv dinners as a kid, but mom claims she was an awful and unimaginative cook before the internet showed her there were better things to cook than bagged frozen vegetables and porkchops.
Come to think of it, meals were very homogenized and underseasoned as a kid. She came from stout scandihoovian stock, and grandma only ever cooked the same five meals which she taught mom.
Yes, frozen bagged veggies (most often peas and corn), Jenny-O turkeyloaf, porkchops, the occasional steak. Lots and lots of mashed taters. When we got the internet when I was a teen, cooking improved considerably, and got much better when mom got her iPad and decided to actually read recipes instead of just going off her reflexive dishes.
Still suffers from terrible underseasoning, but you can’t be too hard on the genetics of a bland people of the far north. My dad starts visibly sweating and gets flushed when he has stuff with ground black pepper in it. You can tell I’m not genetically related to either of them due to my rapid consumption of sriracha and cumin. Although I kind of do envy their ability to taste anything good about cilantro. Overwhelms and ruins everything I’ve ever had it in.
2 Likes
The BOMB burrito has been refined in the intervening years. Yes it still comes out of the microwave with scorching pockets of steam, but they’ve thickened it’s tortilla enough now that if you microwave it on a plate you can just massage the thing for a minute or two to homogenize its temperature.
They’re kind of like a living organism the way you have to baby them.
6 Likes
“Wait. I fear you might have misheard me. You might think I meant ‘a lot of bacon and eggs’. But I said ‘All the bacon and eggs you have.’”
8 Likes
18 Likes
