TV Dinners

A few months ago I made a kind of TV dinner for my kids. It was just before we moved, and really all of our plates, pots and pans were pretty much packed, so I didn’t have much to cook with, or serve food on. I’d seen Kid Cuisine TV dinners in the grocery stores for years, but had never tried them. Now I understand why. They’re a huge pain in the butt to make.

They feature basic kid food—spaghetti, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese—but they tried to go a little fancy with the desserts and have things like iced cake and stuff that gets sprinkles on it. The problem with things like that is that frosting and sprinkles don’t heat up well in an oven or in a microwave, so they have to package them separately and you have to remove them from the package prior to cooking.

Even without the removing of the dessert topping step, they’re extremely complicated. I’ve made whole meals from scratch that required less futzing around than these things. First I had to remove the sprinkles or whatever, then I had to peel back plastic from this area, loosen plastic on that area, cook it for awhile, then remove it from the oven and remove the plastic from this other compartment, and re-cover that other thing. They only cook for about twenty minutes, but it seemed that I was yanking it out of the oven every five minutes to reposition plastic film over the various components.

I was remembering my own experiences with TV dinners back in the 70s. This would have been when they actually came in a little foil tray, instead of in some kind of rigid paper thing that could go in a microwave oven. I think you peeled the foil back from one section—the potatoes, if memory serves—and then stabbed holes over the meat part to vent the steam and then just chucked the whole thing in the oven for a half hour or so. Thirty minutes later you had perfectly baked horrible food.

Actually, I loved TV dinners. I wasn’t much for Salisbury steak, but I loved fried chicken. I honestly only remember three types of TV dinners—the Salisbury steak, the fried chicken, and the turkey with dressing. I guess there were probably others, but those were the three my parents bought for me. Or perhaps those were the three I was willing to eat.

The things I remember most about TV dinners are that the fried chicken was always soggy, the mashed potatoes seemed to be one solid mass of…whatever, and somehow there was always a piece of corn in my dessert. I hate when my food touches, so the piece of corn in my dessert was an abomination in my book. In fact, TV dinners were perfect for me because I didn’t like any of my food to touch, and the little sectioned tray made sure that pretty much nothing would (except for that pesky kernel of corn).

A few years later we started buying Mexican food TV dinners. These my father nicknamed “puddle food” because everything did seem to come in a sort of a puddle. A puddle of refried beans here, a puddle of enchiladas there, even the rice seemed to be a somewhat liquid plop on the tray. Mexican food isn’t really TV dinner food to me. TV dinner food really should be generic “American” food, with no loyalty to any nationality (or any nation that would be willing to claim it, for that matter).

At some point we stopped buying TV dinners and I stepped up to Stouffer’s entrees. These I do buy for my kids, and they’re not bad to make. Mostly you just peel the plastic to vent them, then cook them for awhile. They don’t require the same level of attention as a puppy that hasn’t been housebroken, the way the Kid Cuisine ones did.

In even later life, I moved on to Lean Cuisines and Smart Ones and other low fat/low calorie offerings. These aren’t really TV dinners, per se, because they come in a single tray, like Stouffer’s entrees (which also don’t count as a real TV dinner in my book). Real TV dinners come in a sectioned tray and aren’t low anything. Lean Cuisines aren’t bad in a pinch, but I’ve stopped eating them on any regular basis. I don’t like them enough to eat them more than about twice a year.

I wouldn’t bother to buy a “real” TV dinner today. Even if I cooked it in the oven instead of in the microwave, it still wouldn’t be the same. Now that they’re formulated to cook semi-acceptably in microwaves, they’re different, just like the pot pies I loved as a child. I wish TV dinners were the way they used to be, even though I probably wouldn’t eat them, but I guess everything has to change, even mediocre frozen meals.

Some New Food Rules

In my latest issue of Bon Appetit there’s a blurb on ice cream vs. gelato. It talks about the differences, and then lists a few places to get good versions of either. One of these places (in LA, perhaps not surprisingly) offers such choices as “bacon-caramel,” “Pabst Blue Ribbon-avocado,” and “dill-mascarpone.”

I feel it’s time to put my foot down about this, and a few other related trends.

For starters, bacon- or beer-flavored ice cream is simply an abomination and the making of such vile concoctions should be prohibited by the US Constitution. There’s just no excuse for these retch-inducing combinations. No, I haven’t tried them, but I haven’t tried crickets or guano either. There are some things you just don’t have to try. You just know they’re nasty, and instinctively avoid them. I suppose one could argue that were it not for similar attempts, we might not have flavors like chocolate chip cookie dough, or even coffee ice cream. But then we would also have avoided mistakes like licorice flavored ice cream, so there.

New Food Rule #1: Stop making ice cream out of ingredients that simply don’t belong in ice cream. And if you’re not sure what ingredients simply don’t belong in ice cream, then you need to play it safe and not make ice cream at all. Enough with the chai flavored ice cream, already.

On a related note, I’ve read of a lot of restaurants lately that are serving “bite sized” dessert plates. These are combinations of several different one- or two-bite desserts, which would be fine, except that the pastry chefs are getting a little too cute with this idea and producing things like itty bitty lollipops, and teeny little puffs of cotton candy, and other junk food-inspired offerings. I think the straw that broke my back was the miniature peanut butter and jelly ice cream sundae I read about at a restaurant in Alexandria, VA. Peanut butter ice cream, guava jelly (or something similarly yucky), and the usual sundae fixings, but I think it also had some kind of croissant bread crumbs or something on it as well, to represent the bread of a normal PB&J sandwich. The whole thing was a stomach-turning combination of ick and affected.

New Food Rule #2: No more overprecious teeny tiny desserts that are some kind of riff on childhood junk food favorites. Just make a chocolate cake and let it go at that. If these pastry chefs spent half as much time making really good chocolate cake as they do coming up with darling little nibbles, the world would be a far, far better place. Good chocolate cake is hard to come by.

A take on this teeny dessert concept is the idea of teeny appetizers that look like desserts, but are actually savory. A restaurant in Seattle serves a cracker “waffle cone” filled with a scoop of mashed potato “ice cream” (in this case not actual mashed potato-flavored ice cream, thank God, since that would clearly violate rule #1, but a scoop of mashed potatoes that are intended to look somewhat like ice cream). Making appetizers that are intended to resemble desserts is just as bad as making tiny desserts that are takes on junk food.

New Food Rule #3: Just serve appetizers. Never mind trying to make them look cute. And especially never mind trying to make them look like dessert so that I am oh-so-surprised when I bite into it and discover that it’s not actually sweet, it’s savory! How very whimsical and droll!

I am also of the opinion that the people who run fair concessions should stop deep frying things. Deep fried candy bars, Twinkies, Oreos. At the root of this trend is evidently the Mullen brothers, Clint and Rocky, who came up with the idea of abusing Snickers bars in this fashion, and run fair concessions. Hostess (or to be perfectly accurate, Interstate Bakeries, their parent company) approached the Mullens about the idea of deep frying Twinkies, because Twinkies aren’t revolting enough on their own. They need to be breaded and saturated with fryer oil, too. Fairgoers responded enthusiastically (proving once again that the collective IQ of the American people is just shy of “functional”) and deep frying just about anything became not just acceptable, but trendy. I’m going to sell my idea for deep fried ice cubes. I’m sure they’ll be a runaway hit.

The only weird deep fried item that I will speak up for is deep fried dill pickle rounds. These are actually very yummy, and shouldn’t be scorned in the same breath with other freakish deep fried selections.

New Food Rule #4: Stop deep frying anything and everything. Let’s just stick to the traditional potatoes and chicken, and leave candy bars and cookies out of it.

I read recently about a couple of new restaurants that have a sort of similar philosophy to one another, although they’re executing it in different ways. One actually serves you completely in the dark. The servers are all blind or visually impaired, and the idea is, of course, that if you’re unable to actually see what you’re eating, your other senses (including taste and smell) are thus heightened. The other establishment offers accompaniments to the meal (which it calls “courses”) that are things like burning rosemary branches. That’s not a course; it’s a fire hazard. The concept in this case is that these added scents contribute to what’s being eaten without actually being a part of the dish itself. Tres gimmicky.

New Food Rule #5: Restaurants need to serve food, and not try to come up with ways to make it more dramatic and impactful. People will always need to eat. They will always come back to a restaurant that serves reliably good food, and they’ll tell their friends about it as well. If restaurants serve a high quality product in a pleasant setting with competent service, they won’t need to think up tricky ways of making the food more interesting.

In general, anything that could be described by restaurant critics as “amusing,” “whimsical,” or “fanciful” is not anything I want to eat. I don’t want fanciful food. I don’t want amusing food. I want food that tastes good. When I read any of those adjectives in a restaurant review, I am immediately on my guard. I guess I just have a no-nonsense attitude about food. I’m prepared to try something that sounds unusual, but not something that sounds disgusting or pretentious or both. Thus my contribution of a few new food rules, all of which I can pretty much guarantee will be soundly ignored by chefs around the world, until they themselves come to the conclusion that these things were just silly to begin with, and abandon them all. It’s the story of my life.

More Yucky Food

I was reminded of some more gross foods I’ve come in contact with over the years. They range from mildly disgusting to I-almost-threw-up. I thought I would record them for posterity.

Jello Pretzel Salad
When I was working my first job, my department had a pot luck lunch. The woman who was my manager at the time brought in something that may have had another name, but which I and a friend who worked in the same department have referred to over the years as “Jello Pretzel Salad.” I’ve since learned that this is not as uncommon a recipe as one might think (or hope) after reading it.

Mr. Salty Pretzel Sticks are crushed to a crumb consistency, then mixed with melted butter and sugar, and pressed into a 9” x 13” casserole. Poured over this is strawberry (I guess) Jello that has had a couple of cups of sliced strawberries stirred into it. The whole nasty mess is allowed to gel, then Cool Whip is spread over the top of it, for a final insult to the taste buds.

The woman who brought this couldn’t figure out why no one wanted to eat it.

Actually, only one person did eat it, and to this day my friend and I maintain the guy was just sucking up, because he also worked for her. He ranted on about how wonderful it was, and ate two or three helpings. No one else would touch it.

All the Food at My Husband’s Cousin’s Wedding
In August of 1997, my husband and I drove to Hickory, NC for the wedding of one of his cousins. This wedding was catered (I use the term loosely) but was also a pot luck of sorts. I don’t know what kind of lax standards the Catawba County Department of Health has, but they must be nearly nonexistent, or not well enforced, if this particular caterer was allowed to stay in business.

In the first place, most of the food came from Costco and was just kind of assembled. Mercifully, I don’t remember everything that was served, but the abomination that stands out most prominently is a pan of L’il Smokies that were in some kind of commercially made barbeque sauce. What I do recall about the food was that I refused to eat much of anything because every single thing was swarming with flies. Big fat black flies. Nothing was under any kind of cover, and it was all kept minimally warm at best with a couple of halfhearted cans of Sterno.

On the potluck side, someone had felt the need to contribute wedding symbol-shaped chocolates. Thus it was that there were chocolate bells, doves, and garters or something like that. My sister-in-law and I both passed these by on the buffet table as being nothing we had any interest in. The flies, as I recall, weren’t terribly interested in these either. However, half way through the “meal” our mother-in-law came up to us and declared us to be “neglectful daughters-in-law.” Puzzled, we asked what she was talking about. From behind her back she produced a paper plate with half a dozen of these chocolates on it.

“Because there was chocolate, and you girls didn’t tell me!” she declared.

There was, we knew, no way around it. We were going to have to eat one of these things. We knew just what they were going to be like, and they were.

There is available at stores like Michael’s and Total Crafts a product that is intended for candy making. They sell bags of little “chocolate” disks in varying colors that are then melted down and poured into molds and allowed to harden. However, next to these bags are jars of various extracts that are intended to be used to give these disks their flavor. Somehow people who make candy always overlook the bottles of extracts. This was not my first experience with these melted, re-formed bits of plastic nothing. For reasons that escape me completely, people who make this sort of candy cannot be convinced that the little disks have no flavor on their own, and require the addition of an extract of one kind or another. If you tactfully point out to them that their “candy” tastes like melted plastic, they will insist that you have no taste buds, and that anyone with half a tongue can tell that the brown ones taste like chocolate, the pink ones like strawberry (or peppermint, depending on the individual to whom you are speaking), and so on. They simply cannot be swayed on this point. I have tried.

So my sister-in-law and I each unwillingly ate a tasteless piece of brown resin. To this day we laugh about the experience.

And to heap insult on injury, it was a BYOB wedding. Actually, I stand corrected. They provided a keg of Icehouse beer. Wow, thanks.

P.S. the cousin and the woman he married got divorced two years later.

Canned White Potatoes
In about the same era as the Jello Pretzel Salad Pot Luck Lunch, I was invited along with my then-boyfriend (whom I did not marry), to dinner at a coworker’s house. She and her husband lived in what was actually a very cute row house on Capitol Hill. The dinner, while more edible than most of the gross food I’ve described, included some kind of meat (I no longer recall what), asparagus (which I put in my mouth and chewed up just to be polite, but did not enjoy), and canned white potatoes.

I found this both disgusting and curious. For one thing, I would never serve canned anything to a guest. For another thing, they went and bought the asparagus fresh, so why could they not have found some fresh potatoes to go along with the meal? I have never been able to figure this out, but I have always considered those canned white potatoes to be among the most disgusting foods I’ve ever eaten.

Almost All the Food Ever Served at Parties Thrown by College Friends
Really this pertains to the period of time right after we got out of college. Many of those friends are now fairly accomplished cooks and can provide pretty decent food, when called on. On the other hand, some are not.

In the early 90s, they were often found serving such delicacies as frozen meatballs cooked in grape jelly and chili sauce. Or appetizers that they bought at Costco and defrosted. Or cheese platters from Giant Food. Or sausage balls made with Bisquick (OK, I admit it—I actually love these).

In fact, the only party food that stands out as memorable and good is what was served every year by a friend who threw an annual Chinese New Year party. She actually made real Chinese food, like dumplings and noodles, and had everyone over for an authentic Chinese New Year meal, complete with fortune cookies (which she bought). The year she finally stopped having these parties, we were all extremely sad. However, I understand why she stopped—she spent days, possibly even weeks, prior to that party making all the food from scratch. It was hard work, and she did a fantastic job. But I can’t blame her for stopping.

The Very Worst Thing I Have Ever “Eaten”
I put eaten in quotes here, because I didn’t actually get this into my stomach. Many years ago I was forced to spend the night in the hospital for observation. (I’m fine now, thanks for asking.) It also happened that this was the Sunday to Monday of Memorial Day weekend. Hospitals are not known for their quality food under the best of circumstances. The food gets even worse on the weekends, when the regular staff is off. It deteriorates even further on the third day of a holiday weekend (or so I’m told). I can only believe this, based on my experience.

I was served for breakfast that Monday morning a product known as a French Toast Stick. I believe at one time Burger King sold these. But, as I recall, the ones at Burger King were edible. I hesitated, but being hungry, I went ahead and tried to eat one of these things. I think I might have chewed it five times before insisting that my husband (who had thankfully arrived a few minutes earlier) hand me the wastebasket, because I was going to be very sick. Well, I wasn’t actually sick, but I certainly didn’t let that French toast stick linger in my mouth for any length of time.

Since then I have eaten hospital food that was edible, but I have never eaten French toast, and I don’t believe I ever will be able to again.

I’m sure there are other gross things I’ve eaten over the years, and doubtless there will be more. The parade of gross food never ends, although mercifully, it seems to have slowed somewhat.

Christmas...um...Treats

Even though it’s nearly Spring, something the other day happened to remind me of Christmas. Actually, it was the bag of red, green, and silver foil wrapped Hershey’s Kisses I found that were plainly left over from Christmas. I tend to buy the holiday wrapped candy a week or so after the holiday at half price. A Hershey’s Kiss wrapped in green foil is still a Hershey’s Kiss, after all.

This discovery reminded me of some of the more memorable holiday foods I’ve come into contact with over the years. The holidays are typically a time of indulgence, of course, and I’ve done my share of indulging, I admit. Interestingly, the things that stand out most in my memory are not the really wonderful things I’ve had, but the less wonderful, or even very awful ones.

When I was small, my grandmother used to send us boxes of baked goods every Christmas. There are only two things that she sent that really made an impression on me, and again, it’s because they were both fairly horrible, in retrospect. At the time I thought they were pretty good. The first was a variation on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the second was Twinkies. I think my grandmother knew how much I liked junky foods like those, and in an effort to save money (always a top priority for her) she decided to make them for me, rather than buy them.

The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup things were chocolate covered peanut butter balls. If you don’t know this, peanut butter gets grainy when it’s refrigerated. I don’t mind that texture, but chocolate gets waxy when it’s refrigerated, and I do mind that. Also, my grandmother always put raisins in her peanut butter balls. I don’t like raisins plain to start with, but I sure don’t like them in things. So to sully perfectly good peanut butter and chocolate with raisins is just downright wrong in my book, and then to refrigerate it on top of that renders the whole product totally inedible. Since she was sending the stuff out of the kindness of her heart, I didn’t very well feel like I could complain (not that I’m not complaining now, but I would never have hurt her feelings by saying anything to her).

The Twinkies were just kind of weird. I really have no idea what she used for “creme” filling, only that it wasn’t white frosting (which is pretty much what Twinkie filling is—white frosting, probably made with pure lard and sugar, likely with some titanium dioxide tossed in for good measure and whitening and brightening purposes). She made a simple sponge cake, and then cut it into rectangles, which she layered together with this “creme”. I remember eating them, and liking them fairly well, but today I have to agree with my aunt. At the time she remarked “Who would bother to make a Twinkie?” (and the question wasn’t posed as to why you wouldn’t simply go buy them, but more why anyone would want to have anything to do with a Twinkie in any form at all).

Since then I have actually seen "Twinkie" pans for sale through the Williams-Sonoma catalog. Clearly there are people who feel that homemade Twinkies are a good idea. It takes all kinds, I guess.

My husband’s grandmother was also a seasonal baker. She made mostly cookies—chocolate chip, Mexican wedding cakes, and the like—and fudge. He said they were great when he was a kid, but last batch that was inflicted on me was pretty terrible. The cookies were either hard as rocks or flavorless, or both, and the fudge was like eating chocolate plastic. He agreed that it was all horrible, and we sewed all of it at intervals along the Taconic State Parkway as we drove home. I’m not sure if her offerings were always so terrible, or if they just deteriorated as she aged. It’s not the sort of thing I can gauge because I never tasted anything until it had gone past awful, and he might be remembering the flavor in the forgiving glow of childhood nostalgia. She has now grown too old for holiday baking, for which we are all somewhat guiltily grateful.

I think the person who provided the most repulsive holiday “treat” was Aunt Stevie. Aunt Stevie was married to Uncle Mike (before he died, of course), and was my husband’s great aunt. Aunt Stevie lived in Sacramento or something, and every Christmas she would send a “tower o’ treats” thing to my husband’s grandparents “for everyone to share.” This was a very kind gesture, but the tower consisted of Aplets and Cotlets. Aplets and Cotlets are the most horrid candy every made (I use the term “candy” loosely, since I’m not sure they're not actually made of melted-down rubber bands). Interestingly, I recently found out that they're made not far from where I now live. That doesn’t improve their flavor or texture, but now I’m grossed out by something made locally. I feel I’m contributing to saving the environment, somehow.

During one holiday celebration, my husband’s grandmother (nickname Grammy), kept insisting that we take some with us. My mother-in-law, sister-in-law and I protested that we didn’t want to deprive them of Aunt Stevie’s gift. Grammy kept saying that Stevie had sent them “for the family to share.” Finally, in an effort to get out of there before St. Patrick’s Day, I grabbed the smallest box and said “OK, thanks--well, we’ll be on our way.” On the way out the door, my mother-in-law asked me low in my ear which box I’d taken. “The smallest one,” I hissed back. Needless to say the box was promptly consigned to the trash compactor (still in its cellophane wrapper) the minute we arrived back at my in-laws’ house.

My husband says my in-laws used to get a fruitcake from his grandparents every year that was fairly nasty. But fruitcake is so clichéd that it doesn’t even get a mention in annals of Nasty Holiday Treat Gifts. My preference is for unusual disgusting holiday treats. If I have to eat something yucky and pretend i like it, at least I want it to be something yucky and interesting.