Cracker Jack Prizes SUCK.

Photo by Time Passages Nostalgia

Once upon a time, Cracker Jack prizes were real, actual miniature toys. Originally, they were made of cast potmetal, like the ones at right: a little replica wood-burning stove, a battleship, an airplane, an ice skate, a replica carved pipe, and I guess that blue thing is probably a thimble. 

Photo by Time Passages Nostalgia

As time went on, the prizes got somewhat chintzier, like these plastic ones from the 1960's. But they were still actual miniature toys, real toys that had some kind of play value.

The Cracker Jack company, though, wasn't finished getting cheap and stingy with the prizes. Even as they were raising prices and making packages smaller (as if no one ever notices that, right??) the prizes kept getting crappier through the 1980's until finally the best a kid could hope for was a booklet of dye-transfer temporary tatoos. Remember those? You'd wet your arm (probably with your own spit, admit it, you know you did) and press the tattoo down to transfer the inks to your skin.  Compared to the tiny compasses, plastic charms, and other little toys that they replaced, those tatoos were junk. But let me tell you, compared to the absolute shit that Cracker Jack calls a "SURPRISE," the tatoos were gold coins.

You get down to the bottom of the package of Cracker Jack, and this is what your find: a little paper packet that looks like it might be four pages wide. And it's tiny. Like the size of a big postage stamp. You know it's going to suck, because it's way to thin to be anything decent made of paper, like a five-dollar bill or something.  And to add insult to injury, they print "GUESS WHAT'S INSIDE?" on the front. Really, Cracker Jack? You want me to guess?  You really want me to guess?  Okay: Is it something shitty with no goddamn fun value at all? OF COURSE IT IS! What do I win for guessing right? Oh yeah: I win something shitty with no goddamn fun value at all!

I opened it anyway and look what I got. Cracker Jack calls it a "pencil topper." It's got two little pencil-sized slits in it so when you slip it over the end of a yellow pencil you can pretend it's being humped by bees. 

WOW, FUN, HUH?

Review: Banquet Pepperoni Stuffed Breadsticks

Here we go again, with another cheap, microwave-ready frozen snack from ConAgra's Banquet brand. This time, it's Pepperoni Stuffed Breadsticks with Marinara Dipping Sauce.

Before cooking.

Right out of the package, the frozen breadsticks look almost like real pepperoni wrapped in dough. Pay close attention to the product, though, and you'll see that the "reduced fat pepperoni stick" is actually an extrusion of red paste. 

The ingredients panel on the box horrifyingly reveals that the "reduced fat pepperoni" is in fact made of dough, "meat blend" made of beef and pork, textured vegetable protein, "restricted melt cheese," "substitute mozzarella cheese," and a Monsanto inventory's worth of various chemicals.

After cooking.

It's quite a stretch for Banquet to call it a "stick" at all, since after cooking the pepperoni-dough core of the breadsticks melts and spreads and bonds with the plain bread dough exterior. The overall effect is soft, chewy and doughy, like a nicely-baked soft breadstick but without any real type of crust.

The marinara dipping sauce that comes with the breadsticks is fairly standard stuff, strongly flavored with oregano and seasoned with crushed garlic, onion, and other Italian-style herbs. While certainly not ground-breaking or very exciting, it is completely authentic-tasting.

Just like with the previously-reviewed Beef & Cheese Quesadillas from Banquet, the Pepperoni Stuffed Breadsticks are - despite their Frankensteinian origins - totally delicious.  I would absolutely buy them again.

Review: Banquet Beef & Cheese Quesadillas

So, there are a couple of cheap new additions to the Banquet section at the local Save-A-Lot, and both of them were looking pretty irresistible the other day. Today, we're taking a look at Banquet's Beef and Cheese Quesadillas.

The package shows two plump quesadillas bursting with beef and cheese, toasted all light and crispy with a cup of sauce for dipping.  The actual package contents aren't presented nearly so well:

The difference between carefully-styled package art and actual contents is an old story, and one on which I'm not going to dwell. As nice at would be to just once find the actual food match the box illustration, ain't never going to happen.

Anyway. The quesadillas are not at all light and crispy. They're thick, heavy, doughy, and chewy. The insides are thinly spread with a mixture that has little business even being called "food," let alone anything as specific as "beef" and "cheese." The ingredients include "substitute cheddar cheese," "cheddar cheese type flavor," "mozzarella type cheese powder," "substitute mozzarella cheese," and "hamburger [ground beef, salt, spice, hydrolyzed corn protein, natural grill flavor, flavorings]." This recipe is from the laboratory, not the kitchen.

The "zesty taco dipping sauce" is just boring and reminded me more of an unsweetened ketchup sauce than anything else.

And yet, for all the seemingly industrial-grade components used to put this horrible anti-food together, I  have to say....

...they're delicious.

I feel dirty and ashamed for saying that. But it's true, and they're only a buck.

Review: Herr's Deep Dish Pizza Cheese Curls

Looks like we're on a roll with the Herr's cheese curls - seeing as I bought a number of varieties last week, I figured I might as well make a series out of the reviews.

Deep Dish Pizza curls are truly worthy of inclusion in the series. Like the Jalapeno Poppers flavor, they capture the essence of the food they are imitating, and do it in a crazy simple way: coating the surface with different blends of powdered cheeses and spices.

Thanks to noticeable notes of romano cheese and oregano,  the curls have a very authentic taste. Herr's even manages to fool our tastebuds into thinking there might be some kind of tomato involved in the charade, but I checked the ingredients panel and found that there were no tomato-based ingredients (like tomato powder, for example) used - although maybe that came under the umbrella heading of "spices" or "flavors."

Regardless of tomato inclusion status, Herr's Deep Dish Pizza cheese curls accomplish what they set out to do: Delivering a crunchy and addicting pizza flavor while simultaneously coloring your fingers orange.

Review: Herr's Jalapeno Poppers Cheese Curls

Have you ever tried to eat just a single cheese curl? It can't be done. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that the basic unit of cheese curl measurement isn't the single curl, but rather the handful.

And so it is, I guess, with reviews of cheese curls - specifically, Herr's cheese curls. You see, I found this huge variety of Herr's curls over at Ocean State Job Lot one afternoon, and I could not make up my mind which one or two to buy. So I just said "the hell with it," and bought a bag of every flavor they had. Yesterday I reviewed the authentically-flavored but parchingly over-salted Nacho Cheese; today we take a handful of the Jalapeno Poppers variety.

As I pointed out before, all cheese curls share a common structure - the differences between flavors are usually larger than the differences between brands (not always, though - I'm sure you've tasted really cheap curls that leave your mouth feeling greasy.)  While Herr's Nacho Cheese flavor was totally dominated by the saltiness, Herr's Jalapeno Poppers curls are dominated by awesomeness.

As soon as you open the bag, you know you are in for jalapenal delight. You can actually smell the roasted jalapeno pepper aroma.  Taking a bite just confims it: Full-bodied pepper flavor, a mild fire on the tongue that builds steadily as you dig into the bag, and delicious cheese backing up the whole thing. These cheese curls fully deliver on the flavor experience of eating jalapeno poppers.

Well played, Herr's.  Well played indeed.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

What could be more American than Pop Tarts TEAM USA Mixed Berry flavored Pop Tarts with special, Limited-Edition GO FOR THE GOLD foil packaging?

How patriotic! Pop-Tarts that are baked with Real Fruit (follow the front-label apostrophe to the bottom of the side panel where, in small print, you'll find that Real Fruit! actually means "equal to 10% fruit") and covered with red, white, and blue frosting & sprinkles.

I bet if the Olympics featured a Snacking event, America would sweep the medals.

Wild Bill's Bacon Jerky

When Dave and I were both feeling at our worst, I was the one stuck doing some shopping. As I wandered aisles and aisles of food that didn't look appealing and was preoccupied wishing I could go back to bed, I saw the food equivalent of a choir of angels: Wild Bill's Bacon Jerky. I immediately tossed it into the cart, chortling with glee, and went home knowing that I was definitely forgetting something important (milk,) but arriving with something that would certainly make Dave feel better. And besides, bacon jerky must be interesting, because hot damn, who doesn't love jerky?

Well, when I brought it home and we zipped the package open, both Dave and I were disappointed to find nothing more than thick cut, precooked bacon inside. The flavor was okay - a bit on the salty side, if you ask me - but it had this welcome smokiness that brought together the whole flavor profile of the bacon. It wasn't jerky, though. Just plain old precooked bacon, at a 300% markup.

Live and learn, I suppose.

Dave Says:

I was pretty psyched to try this stuff, because you know: BACON.  And also: JERKY. Hot damn. It was quite a disappointment to open up the bag and find thick-cut but otherwise pretty run-of-the-mill precooked bacon, broken up into bite-size (and smaller) chunks.  WTF, six bucks for three ounces of this?  Not cool.  I mean, it was as good as any other precooked bacon I've ever bought, but at least I can get Hormel and Oscar Mayer ready-to-eat pigstrips on sale and in whole slices.

My first thought was that Monogram Meat Snacks, the guys responsible for the Wild Bill's brand, were buying precooked bacon shards that other companies couldn't put into a ready-to-eat bacon package because the slices weren't whole anymore. But no: the USDA Establishment Number printed on the package shows that the bacon was processed by Monogram their own selves.

Anyway, my official rating: decent bacon but definitely not jerky, and not something I'd go out of my way for.

Retro Doritos!

Check it out - taco flavor Doritos are back.  And so is the vintage '70's graphic design.  This is, of course, quite awesome because taco Doritos were my favorite flavor back when I was a young punk in the late '70s.  

Hmm.  Snack food nostalgia. It's an odd feeling.

Life Savers Gummies: Island Fruits flavors

There are two kinds of food I'll try with almost no hesitation. The first one is potato chips. There's something about the greasy little buggers that I absolutely adore. If there was ever a way to win my heart with little or no effort, potato chips would be the way to go. The second is with any kind of gummi or other fruit snack. Even more than chips, I'll do anything for a fruit snack. Whenever I notice a new kind of gummi, I'm all over it.

So when I was down in Florida and saw these Life Savers Island Fruits gummis at the local Publix, I couldn't resist. I ended up picking up a bag of these and a bag of Wonka Squishy Splooshberries gummies. I'll review the oddly named Wonka ones later.

The thing I like best about Life Savers gummies is that they're almost always universally good. I've never had a lifesavers gummi candy that I haven't liked. These were, unsurprisingly to me, no exception.

They come in four flavors: pineapple, fruit punch, strawberry kiwi, and mango melon. Mmm, delicious. The pineapple ones taste exactly like the hard fruits used to back in the day, before they discontinued them. It was nice to taste that delicious pineapple flavor again. The mango melon ones were also really delicious, with a strong mango flavor and just the slightest backdrop of canteloupe. The fruit punch ones were the fairly standard fruit punch flavor - they tasted just like red Hawaiian Punch. The most disappointing one was the one I was really looking forward to: the strawberry kiwi one, which had a completely artificial strawberry flavor and a hint of that artificial grass-like kiwi flavor.

Other than the disappointment of the strawberry kiwi gimmi, the others were all really enjoyable. I'm not sure if I'd really call them "island" fruits as much as I would "troipcal" (which mean almost the same thing in the marketing world anyway) but if I saw them again around here, I'd pick them up. They were a nice change of pace from the typical flavors that you find in every pack of gummies and fruit snacks.

Armour Vienna Sausage

Oh, Big Lots, you magnificent bastard!  I never fail to find something interesting, intriguing, or unsettling when I walk through your doors!  Like Vienna Sausage...in flavors!  How could I resist?

Before I start, I should mention that I actually like Vienna sausages and have since I was a kid.  If anything, I might even like them better nowadays since I'm watching my carb intake and a can of these little meatsticks only has about 7g of carbohydrates.  Now on with the tasting:

Original -  I guess I could call this the control sample.  Plain and unadorned, they're made of chicken, beef and pork and canned in chicken broth (this is a slight change from a few years ago, when they were canned in beef broth.)  The label reads "America's Favorite" and I kind of believe it because I've tried other Vienna sausage (hello, Libby's - hi there, Goya!) and Armour really are the best; they taste like mild hot dogs, only "squishier."  The other three flavors are more or less just dressed-up versions of Original.

Barbecue Flavored - Instead of being packed in broth, these are packed in a tomato-based barbecue sauce.  I wasn't sure what to expect from them since cheap barbecue sauce is generally pretty heinous, but amazingly, they're fairly good.  In fact, with a little more spice the barbecue sauce could even attain something close to excellence, since - unlike many bottled BBQ sauces available at the supermarket - there isn't a drop of high-fructose corn syrup in them.  So here's to you, Pinnacle Foods, you're OK in my book.  I would definitely buy these again.

Smoked - In a word:  Awesome.  Seriously.  And that really shouldn't be a surprise, since most meats are better for a bit of time in a smokehouse.  The label says "Hickory Smoke Flavor Added" so I thought that they probably just put a little bit of "liquid smoke" in the can before processing.  No.  They are really smoked - when you pull apart the bundle of sausages, you can see that there's no smoke marks where the wieners were pressed together.  I was impressed.

Jalapeno - Although they were my least favorite of the four, they were still pretty good.  The weenies are made with jalapeno powder, so don't go looking for little slices of pepper in the bottom of the can.  But you can really taste the full-bodied pepper flavor when you chomp into the sausages.  There's enough spicy heat in them to satisfy a mild craving for fire (enough for me at lunchtime, thanks) but I'm betting they'd be considered on the mild side by a die-hard chilihead.

So.  Four cans of Vienna sausage, four decent lunches.  I think I did pretty well.

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Hormel Kid's Kitchen Cheezy Mac 'n Cheese

If a handful of these Hormel heat-and-eat lunch tubs hadn't been on markdown over at Stop & Shop last week, I never would have tried them.  But they were priced to move at 50 cents each, so I tossed a couple into the cart on impulse as I went past.

I guess the packaging is designed so that kids with little kitchen experience can heat it up themselves in the microwave.  Pop the metal top off, give it a stir, put the plastic lid on and nuke it for a minute. Then stir again and eat.  Pretty basic.  

The ingredients are pretty basic as well, mostly macaroni and cheese (well, pasteurized processed American cheese but it still counts) with other stuff like butter, cream cheese, milk, and water.  And salt and flavorings.  I give Hormel props for bucking the usual practice in processed foods, however:  this product contains no high-fructose corn syrup.  It's fairly light in calories (230 for the tub) but there's a heavy sodium load at 750 mg.

So, enough of this nutritional jibber jabber.  Let's get to the important stuff:  Taste.

The sauce is decidedly Velveeta-like: orange, mild, with actual cheese flavoring more predominant than saltiness.  Although it was smooth and creamy, it's strong processed-cheese flavor actually worked against it for me (I would have preferred a more complex cheese sauce flavor with perhaps a bit of blue cheese or even a couple of dashes of Worcestershire sauce in the pot to liven it up) but this is a common mistake with big food conglomerates - they assume that kids have wooden palates and deliver kind of bland food to them, training them to continue having wooden palates.

Also, there's a ton of it.  Stir the pot after taking it out of the microwave, and you reveal a huge amount of cheesy orange lava below the top surface of macaroni.  The little macaroni tubes are swimming in a seemingly vast amount of it.  I know that when Lynnafred was about 10 years old, this would have been like a meal from Paradise to her, but I got ahold of a spoon and ladled some of that stuff right out.   Once the surplus cheese was removed and I got to douse it in ketchup like I do with all macaroni and cheese, it wasn't all that bad.  I might even give it to a kid for a snack, as long as I kept an eye on how much salt they were going to take in for the rest of the day.

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McDonald's Angus Burgers Want Your Love

So McDonald's has opened a new website called "Angus Honors." Users can visit there and make up a two-word "headline" that gets placed into a banner display for McD's Angus Third Pounder burgers:


McDonald's calls it a "microsite," and this headline submission app is pretty much all that's there. You click on the "start now" button, enter your date of birth (if it's your first visit) and then get a template where you can enter a word on either side of a burger photo. Before submitting it, you need to fill out a short form with your name, a checkbox agreeing to "terms and conditions" and your email address if you want a link to you from the gallery where your creation will be stored and displayed.

There's no contest or sweepstakes involved and no prizes that I can see. So I thought I'd have a little fun:

I suspect that my submission won't be appearing in the gallery soon.

Remember those terms and conditions I mentioned earlier? Reading them reveals that anything you enter on the Angus Honors microsite become instantly and permanently the property of McDonald's USA for them to use any way they like without ever having to compensate you. Now that's a hell of a deal: you might have a great time coming up with a slogan, but if you hit gold with a phrase that McDonald's uses as a centerpiece of their next ad campaign, the fun you had is your only reward. If only their ad agencies worked so cheaply.







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Gummies, Gooier Than Usual

It was a murderously hot and humid day yesterday. The digital thermometer across the street from the parking lot said 97 F. The car was closed up and locked and in the sun all day. Who knows how hot it got in the car?

The Gummies knew. Trapped together, shoulder to shoulder, rolled up in their plastic bag. They knew how hot it was in the car that day. They felt it. The temperature rose and the sugar slowly melted into their glistening skin, and their Gummi Grins turned into Nervous Uncomfortable Gummi Smiles as they found themselves first sticking to one another and then melting - fusing - flowing together as one! No! NOOOOOOOOO!!!

Their fear and horror and outrage were in vain, of course. No mere Gummi could withstand the wrath and fire of the angry star, and by the time help arrived it was too late. Their comfy plastic bag had become a coffin, sealed shut by the sticky mass of melted candy inside.

Don't leave a bag of gummies in a hot car.

Dollar Store Nightmares: Butter Blend Spread Solids

I swear, the refrigerated sections of dollar stores are the nutritional equivalents of stepping outside Vault 101 in Fallout3. Check out this "spread," which we are led to believe is supposed to be analogous to butter:

"Butter Blend Spread Solids." The very name sounds like something wet and vaguely chunky that got caught in an industrial filth strainer. A quick check of the ingredient list shows that both "water" and "palm kernel oil" appear near the top of the list, and "butter" down towards the bottom, which should give us all a pretty good idea of the type of thing we're dealing with here.

Also, because my sense of humor seems to have stopped developing sometime around eighth grade, I laughed when I realized that their logo seems to have been borrowed from an an ASCII representation of a penis. 8===>

Nissin Instant Yakisoba

Whenever I go to my local Asian grocery store, the first place I go to is the back corner. It's a thirty-foot by thirty-foot square dedicated to nothing but different kinds of ramen and other instant noodles. The last time I was there, they were busy renovating the area, but one thing did catch my eye as I was rummaging through the vast quantities of noodles: a five pack bag of Nissin Instant Yakisoba noodles. I couldn't resist: I had to buy a bag and taste them immediately.

I quickly learned that Nissin's Yakisoba ramen isn't your typical instant-noodle treat. To start, it's not as overbearingly salty as most other ramen; it's actually a little sweet, with a well-rounded group of flavors instead of just one or two noticable ones. Second of all, and probably most importantly, instead of being boiled for a few minutes in a pot, it's boiled in a small pan and finished by stir-frying, giving an old classic a new twist.


Unlike most of the other ramen I buy there, this was entirely in Japanese, so I really had to stumble my way through making it. 220 mL (slightly less than a cup) of water goes into a small frying pan, and as soon as it comes to a boil, the noodles and sauce packet go in. The sauce powder, upon a preliminary sniff, smelled heavily of soy, but not much else.

As it cooked, I followed one of the diagrams on the back of the package and pulled the noodles apart with a fork, stirring it every now and then to make sure everything cooked evenly. As the soupy sauce started to thicken, it started to gain a nicer, sweeter smell as well, and when it had thickened enough that it was no longer waterlike in consistency, I pulled it off the heat and got ready to enjoy my yakisoba.

In addition to the sauce packet, the package came with an additional, smaller packet of finely crushed green seaweed that was supposed to be sprinkled on top, but I decided to hold off on that for the time being.

The noodles (sans seaweed) had a full, rounded out flavor that contained hosin sauce, soy sauce, five spice powder (the cinnamon and star anise were especially noticeable, but not overpoweringly so,) and ginger. Every flavor complimented one another without it being either too salty nor too sweet, and the touch of ginger added just a hint of spicy to the mix. All in all, they were very, very good.

...but then I added the seaweed. The little bit of seaweed in the pouch made the entire dish taste very grassy and vaguely like low tide; it singlehandedly knocked out the other flavors, much to my disappointment. But had it not been for that, it would have been very good. Next time I'll make sure to leave the seaweed out.

Banquet Chicken Fried Chicken

Congratulations, ConAgra. You've managed to give one of your Banquet meals perhaps the stupidest names I've ever seen. "Chicken Fried Chicken." Nice going.

The Chicken Fried Chicken Meal consists of a boneless fried chicken patty with country-style gravy, mashed potatoes, and corn. It's a fairly standard lunch plate and should be easy for Banquet to get right. And yet, the far weirder Banquet Smothered Burrito was actually better in many ways.

The boneless chicken patty in this meal is a strange thing. It's nicely breaded, and flavorful in it's way, but it's got a strange texture. Very artificial; it reminded me of the really cheap chicken "cutlet" thingies they used to serve in the school cafeteria when I was a kid. It's not really recognizable as "chicken" when cut open. There's ground meat in there, and blobby-looking stuff, and the inside sort of fades into seasoned crumbs as you get closer to the surface. The patty sits in a pool of "country-style gravy" which isn't too bad, there just isn't enough of it (not enough to cover the patty, not enough to have some on your mashed potatoes, and especially not enough to keep the microwave from cooking it until it turns into some strange sort of gelatinous resin in the tray.)

The corn was fairly decent. Don't look for meltingly tender kernels or candycorn sweetness here: Banquet chooses a manly corn indeed, dense and chewy with deep corn flavor. It's actually pretty good, despite needing a sprinkle of salt. The mashed potatoes were also up to par though, like I mentioned earlier, it would have been nice to have enough gravy to dress them up a bit.

Overall, worth every penny of the $1.25 I paid (damning with faint praise, as they say.) Too bad that the weak point in this frozen meal is the main course.

Banquet Smothered Burrito

You don't have to shop dollar stores to find some strange and unusual foods - thanks to ConAgra's Banquet brand, there's always something interesting in the freezer section of the grocery store. Like this lunch: Smothered Burrito. Doesn't the Serving Suggestion Enlarged To Show Quality look delicious? There's a plump "bean, beef and textured soy protein burrito" ladled with delicious "queso sauce" and a helping of "Mexican style rice" and refried beans. If it weren't for the queso sauce looking a little like that fake rubber vomit you can buy in novelty stores, the stuff would look pretty good. You can bet the food stylist in ConAgra's art department spent a few long hours carefully assembling that plate of grub for the photographer.

Of course, real life is never really the same as a painstakingly crafted food model.

Clockwise from left: Burrito smothered in queso sauce, refried beans, Mexican style rice.

Okay, so it's not much to look at. How does it taste?

Surprisingly, not as bad as I thought it would when I laughingly plucked it out of the freezer case at the local Shaw's. The refried beans were pretty awful. There were virtually no pieces or chunks of bean in the serving; it was a thoroughly pureed, drooly brown paste with very little flavor. The rice was similarly underseasoned, but somewhat better. I had expected overcooked mushy rice, but got surprisingly firm medium-grain rice with small bits of mild red and green bell pepper. There was too much sauce for the rice, of course - a gluey concoction of modified food starch, cumin, and turmeric - but at least there was a hint of spicy heat that kept my taste buds from falling asleep.

The burrito was kind of strange. Tortillas don't really microwave well, and heating the meal turned the tortilla into a tough and chewy membrane filled with a reddish-brown...filling. It tasted goodish, I guess, and vaguely south-of-the-border in kind of the same way that Taco Bell reminds you of Mexican food without ever really being actual Mexican food. And the queso sauce was not nearly as laughably nasty as it looked - it was actually cheesy and somewhat flavorful and contained ingredients such as real heavy cream, Monterey Jack cheese, and diced jalapeno peppers (along with other, more standard industrial food ingredients like locust bean gum, pasteurized process cheese spread, and dry nonfat milk.) I find myself almost surprised to say that I kind of liked it.

Not a gourmet meal by any means, but at $1.25 ($1 on sale if you time it right) it's an acceptable lunch on days you just can't get away from your desk for longer than it takes to work the microwave.

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Microwave vs. Oven: Frozen Pizza

I admit, I'm not a big fan of microwave ovens. I have one in my kitchen, like just about everyone else, but I don't put it to much use - heating frozen or canned vegetables, mostly. I hate the texture most things get when they're "cooked" in the microwave, and I don't think that the savings in time is worth the dramatic decrease in quality of the finished product.

Recently, though, some companies have introduced recipe changes in their manufactured prepared foods that have made products better suited for microwaves. Pot pies, for example. I used to hate pot pies cooked in the microwave because the crusts came out so badly. But recently, Banquet and Marie Callendar pot pies seem to have tweaked the way their crusts are made - I honestly couldn't tell the difference between a microwaved and a baked pot pie the last time I had them.

And that got me to thinking about frozen pizzas. When I was a kid, frozen pizzas were the bottom of the frozen-food barrel. Nasty in all ways - the crusts were flavorless cardboard, the sauce was cheap, acidic, and rarely seasoned with anything but too much oregano, and the cheese was like plastic. Nowadays, though, there are some really decent frozen pizzas out there. Just about all of them are better when cooked in a conventional oven, though.

The first time I ever tried heating frozen pizza in a microwave, it was a Celeste Pizza For One. Even given the generally low quality of Celeste pies to begin with, it was horrible. The cheese was hard and brownish-yellow, the crust leathery and unchewable, and enough of the moisture had evaporated from the sauce to render it into a kind of tangy red tar. Microwaves were just getting wide acceptance then, and food companies were starting to adapt their products to this new way of ruining dinner.

This week, with Celeste Pizzas For One selling for a dollar each at the local Stop & Shop, I picked up a couple of them and decided to do a head-to-head comparison of cheap frozen pizzas cooked in the microwave and in a conventional oven. I picked the Pepperoni variety and followed the package directions to the letter.

Microwave Instructions: Remove frozen pizza and microwave disk from carton; unwrap. For best results, do not add additional toppings. Cetner disk, silver side up, on microwave-save plate. Place frozen pizza on disk. Place plate in microwave oven. Microwave on HIGH (100%) power 3½ to 4½ minutes, or until most of the cheese is melted, rotating ¼ turn after 2 minutes. Carefully remove pizza from oven. Loosen pizza from disk with spatula.

Result: The package instructions were clear and easy to follow, and did produce a somewhat evenly-heated and acceptable pizza. The cheese melted well but also tended to dehydrate a bit, leaving it translucent and stiff. And because the microwave made the sauce bubble up from the crust, the already-stingy application of cheese looked even less generous as it became hidden beneath a layer of bubble-pocked redness.

The microwave disk definitely helped make the crust crispy, and it was far better than that first one years ago, but it's clear they have a long way to go here. The edges were crunchy, but coming in from the edges the crust was dense and tough, and parts here and there were dehydrated.

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Conventional Oven Instructions: Place baking sheet on center oven rack; preheat oven to 400F. Remove frozen pizza from carton; unwrap. Place frozen pizza on PREHEATED baking sheet. Bake 11 to 13 minutes or until center cheese is melted and crust edge is golden brown. For extra crisp crust: Place frozen pizza directly on center oven rack. Bake as directed.

Result: The cheese was much more evenly melted, without and dehydrated, plasticy areas. The sauce stayed put, bubbling a bit but not pushing its way up through the cheese. Parts of the cheese got golden brown on the surface.

The crust was much nicer on the baked pizza - crispy, but also flaky and tender, with a toasted edge. Although not as agressively crunchy as the microwaved version, it was pleasantly toasted around the edges.

One other thing I noticed: I timed the cooking phase so that each pizza would come out of the oven and be served at the same time. Both of the pies were cooked exactly to package specifications, and yet the microwaved pizza got cold faster than the conventionally-cooked one. I've noticed this in other microwaved foods as well, and it's another reason why I don't use the microwave very often.

Conclusion:

Celeste Pizza For One is still a pretty crappy frozen pizza, even if frozen pizzas themselves have gotten better over the years.

Link:

Pinnacle Food Group, Inc. holds the Celeste frozen pizza brand. The number of other familiar brands they own might surprise you.

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Maraschino Cherries

Have you ever stopped to consider what a marvelous feat of culinary technology is sitting there, all red and shiny, in the pillow of whipped cream on top of your sundae?

It's true, you know. That ordinary ol' maraschino cherry is amazing. It starts out with a normal, natural cherry - but that's before the processing starts. The fruit is completely transformed: the color is removed, the natural flavor taken out - the very structure of the fruit itself is changed into a kind of candy. Then, flavors are added, a uniform color is reintroduced, and the magically-altered cherries are packed in jars of syrup. And all this is done without the stem even falling off! Wow, right?

As cool and awesome as this is, maraschino cherries just became cooler and more awesome. Because yesterday I found Roland BLUE MARASCHINO CHERRIES.

They're delicious. Bright, neon blue, bursting with blue razz flavor, and so thoroughly unnatural it might as well be manufactured at the Soylent Green factory.

Roland is making cherries in five non-traditional varieties: Lemon, Passion Fruit, Lime, Wild Berry, and Chocolate. I've only tried the Wild Berry ones...but I can't wait to try some of the others.

New Pop-Tart Varieties

Three new varieties of Pop-Tarts caught my daughter's eye recently. She bought a box of each and we did some tasting. Not all at once, though - the days when I could stand to eat that many Pop-Tarts in one sitting are long gone.

Vanilla Milkshake - I can't figure out what is supposed to be "milkshakey" about this flavor; it's got white frosting with embedded rainbow sprinkles, and it seems to be filled with some kind of vanilla frosting (very creamy in texture, almost drips out when the Pop-Tart is broken open or pulled apart.) Quite delicious vanilla flavor, but nothing obviously "milky" about the taste at all. Perhaps it's because of all the whiteness? Or maybe it's the calcium. Calcium. Why does Kellogg's keep trying to convince everyone that their oversweetened yet delicious piles of empty calories are good for you? It must be a callous marketing ploy. (I know that it can't possibly be anything resembling a "conscience" because large corporations are soulless rat bastards that would happily make baby food out of vivisected puppies and kittens if they could get away with it and were it profitable.) Anyway, thumbs up for the vanilla, they're yummy.

Another strong "thumbs up" goes to the Dulce de Leche, a "Limited Edition" flavor that I have not seen in the mainstream supermarkets around here, but was able to find easily in the nerby city markets catering to Hispanic customers. This has quickly become my daughter's favorite flavor; the rich caramel filling with the little squiggles of brown sugar frosting won her over immediately.

The third and final variety, Guava-Mango, is another "Limited Edition" flavor that we were only able to find at the Hispanic supermarkets. These are tasty, but not quite as successful as the other two - the flavor had no distinct guava or mango notes, but managed to taste more like Hawaiian Punch Fruit Punch than any exotic fruit blend. It tasted a lot like the regular strawberry Pop-Tarts, only less sweet and with a lot less frosting. They were okay, just not something to go out of the way for.