My crime

Not many comments this week, and my reader stats are down, plus this is Friday, so I suppose this is a good time for me to confess to a crime. My crime: I fed my sweetie a pre-packaged “ready to cook” meal last night.

OK, so it’s not the biggest crime ever. But loyal readers know that one of my main points of emphasis when I discuss food at the Blork Blog is the importance of avoiding “factory food” and of making things from scratch as much as possible. I stake this position from the points of view of health and flavor. Stuff you make yourself generally has fewer additives, and tastes better than anything from a package – unless your palate is hopelessly lost to the unholy trinity of too much salt, sugar, and grease, in which case food from a box will likely appeal to you very much.

But last night was an odd one. I generally plan the week’s meals in advance, but for some reason Thursday night was left blank. I didn’t realize it until well into the afternoon, and by then I could find no inspiration for one of my impromptu pantry-raiding escapades.

So I called the girl on the phone and we decided to resort to a frozen packaged meal (for two) that I bought a few weeks ago for just such emergencies. It was one of those new Knorr frozen pasta meals that they’ve been advertising on television recently in which they’re referred to as “f-BEEP’n” meals. The “f-word” in this case is “frozen.” I have to admit, I thought the ads were brilliant, so when I saw the packages at the IGA I decided to buy one.

I chose the Grilled Chicken Alfredo, because it’s the variety that’s most different from something I could normally whip up in ten minutes anyway. Before buying it I checked the ingredients – I was pleasantly surprised to see that the product is 99% food. There is hardly anything in there that I wouldn’t have used if I had made it from scratch. Specifically, here’s what’s in it, with the “iffy” things highlighted:

Alfredo sauce (cream, white wine, parmesan & pecorino romano sheep’s milk cheeses, Bechamel sauce [contains egg], water, onions & garlic, extra virgin olive oil, unsalted butter, spice, salt) Fettuccine pasta (durham wheat semolina, water, liquid whole egg, sunflower oil, salt), grilled seasoned chicken (chicken, water, soy protien isolate, salt, glucose, dehydrated onions & garlic, flavour, sodium phosphate, spice, portobello mushrooms, dehydrated tomatoes (tomatoes, calcium chloride), spice and sulphates.

Generally speaking, not bad. Pretty darn good, actually. I mean really – most of that stuff is actual food. No high fructose corn syrup, no weird gels and gums, no bizarre oils or weird things you can’t pronounce. There is some glucose and soy protein in the chicken, but probably not much – the chicken had the flavor and texture of chicken that had been freshly grilled and sliced.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect, so to help compensate in the event of a disaster, I whipped up a couple of antipasto plates of prosciutto (leftover from Saturday’s pizza adventure), some nice old Cheddar cheese, some spicy sun-dried tomato and olive tapenade, some white anchovies with home-made lemon sauce, and a big rosemary grissino. (So much for no impromptu pantry raid.) I also popped open a nice bottle of crisp French white wine from the Luberon, which is close enough to Italy to not provoke a fist fight. OK, so now I don’t feel so bad.

Then I cooked the Chicken Alfredo thing. It was ridiculously easy – I just dropped everything in the bag into a non-stick pan at low-medium heat and covered it. After five minutes I stirred it, and let it simmer for another five minutes. That was it.

The proof, as always, was is the eating. And the eating, I am both happy and sad to announce, was pretty good. I’m usually put off by “Alfredo” things, as I find them too rich and overly creamy (usually with fake food such as hydrogenated oils and corn starch), but this one was lightly creamy, and quite tasty. The chicken, as I mentioned above, tasted like chicken, and the chunks of mushrooms tasted like mushrooms. The pasta, while not as al-dente as it would be if I’d made this from scratch, was in reasonably good shape and didn’t suffer from the mushiness you usually find in frozen pasta dishes.

Good job. The real test, however, will be to see if they can maintain this high level of quality. As I have absolutely no faith in corporations (especially food corporations), I half expect to see “factory creep” in the ingredients if this product stays on the market, as well as an overall decline in quality. (It’s like a bait-and-switch; a product is great when it’s introduced, and once it develops a faithful following, it slides into decline.)

But maybe that’s just me and my sour cynicism. All I can say for sure is that this one was pretty good. Does it replace home-cooking? No. Would I buy it again for those rare days when I don’t feel like cooking? Hell, yeah!

(As per Blork’s endorsements & sponsorships policy, which you can find at the top of the sidebar under “More Blork,” I have not received any compensation or other consideration from Knorr for this discussion of their product.)

18 thoughts on “My crime

  1. Pantry raids. Nice. I suppose that goes well with the term ‘food porn’.

  2. we often have a bag of pierogies in the freezer for those nights when we don’t feel like cooking AND we don’t feel like going to the grocer for pasta & sauce (a standard standby). I almost always have some greens in the crisper so with some pierogies fried in butter & onions and a side salad, we have a decent meal.

  3. Hey, that actually looks pretty good. And this is coming from the girl who feels guilty about “cheating” by using a Classico jar of tomato sauce as a base to make her full-fledged pasta sauce on the occasional weeknight.

  4. This planning the weeks meal in advance thing has always eluded me. I’m curious about how you do it. There, I just gave you something to blog about!

    As for packaged meals, I highly recommend the PC Indian meals, although I haven’t examined the ingredients in great detail.

  5. Zura, the Classico-as-base trick was one of my trade secrets for years! But then I realized how easy it is to just use tomatoes as a base (good quality tomatoes), and so I stopped using them. But I still have a dozen glass Classico jars laying around that I use to store leftovers and frozen things.

    Lambic, the PC Indian dishes are pretty good. Martine and I use the single-serving ones for lunches. I’ve read the ingredients, and they’re pretty decent in terms of food-to-junk ratio (at least the ones I’ve looked at).

  6. We usually stock a variety of lebanese stuffed pastry things (zaatar, sfiha, etc.) in the freezer for just such occasions. Since they come from good bakeries, I’d be shocked if they didn’t qualify as “real food” through and through.

    And of course, the occasional frozen pizzas. Damn those Dr. Oetkers ones are tasty.

  7. Um, one thing though…what’s the sketchy ingredient labeled “flavor”. That’s often cover for MSG.

    Mmmmm, pierogies…haven’t had those in a long time!

  8. I have an idea for your classico jars… Considering they are standard mason jars, you could always make a huge batch of tomato sauce and can them yourself. I make a basic tomato sauce that once canned lasts me about 6 months (usually end up canning 9 litres). It ends up being much cheaper than buying those jars (which always seem to be missing something), usually less than a buck a jar. Also, it’s fast when you need it, and is still homemade. If i feel like making a primavera or arrabiata sauce, i use those as a base.

    btw, the rings for the jars might not fit on the classico ones, but all you need is for the disk to form a suction…

  9. Lambic, the advance meal planning is really basic. It’s mostly about deciding what we’ll have so that I’ll know in advance what we’ll need (ingredients, something taken out of the freezer, etc.) It’s usually as simple as “Monday: cajun chicken; Tuesday: leftover roast beef; Wednesday: eat out; Thursday: paella.” I write it down on a chalkboard in the kitchen so I’ll remember to make sure I have the stuff ready.

    Jon, I’ve done that kind of thing before, but with fresh tomatoes. I’ve never done canning, so in that case I just froze it. But most of the time my tomato sauces are so quick to make that it’s not worth the trouble to make it in a batch. (My basic tomato sauce takes about 20 minutes to make.)

  10. Tbit and RS: On the subject of pierogies, I was at Jean Talon mkt yesterday to get some of the incredible pancki from the Polish bakery there. While in line a couple of women from Poland were grilling the counterman in their native tongue about frozen pierogie brands. I don’t speak Polish, but it was obvious from the tone and gestures when “russkyia” came up that many imported-from-Poland pierogies are actually made in Russia, then re-packaged and shipped from Poland. They finally settled on one genuine Polish pierogie brand of the three available there, but it’s a question I would not have thought to ask before. One more reason to make like Blork and study the labeling.

  11. it all looks perfectly delightful~! i already told you (in another post) my culinary shame of starting cream of vegetable soups with a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken. [*coughs*. blushes]
    but seriously, in that list of ingredients, even a few of the things you’ve listed as “suspect” may in fact be totally innocuous. soy protein isolate may very well be a seitan or fu kind of soy thing, and glucose is pretty well just sugar, although i’ll let you decide how harmful that is. flavour may be just caramel, and calcium chloride is ground gravel–the same stuff that’s in TUMS (“something your body uses anyway!”).
    but the sodium phosphate and sulphates–you don’t need that in an eff[BLEEP]ing dinner… :-)

  12. I love those PC Indian meals too but have stopped eating them…way too high in sodium, anything up around 900mg and more is way off the radar. I’ve tried making Korma sauce myself (lots of recipes online), and it turned out not too bad and had a lot less salt.

  13. I have yet to find a meal that comes out of a box that I’ve even been able to suffer through. I’ll have to keep this one in mind.

    Once we tried to have 7 course, cardboard box and microwave-only meal and the results were both funny and horrifying. Sadly we lost the video footage.

  14. There are some foods that I always buy “prepackaged” because I can’t be arsed to make it myself (e.g. fresh tortellini, Indian pickles and chutneys, samosas, etc.) and they are actually pretty tasty. I’ve seen a few lines of “healthy” ready meals here lately, that only contain natural ingredients (some even organic). I guess people are never going to give up convenience food completely, but at least they can get slightly healthier options these days. Remember when it was all Swanson’s TV dinners? ;)

  15. Couldn’t find any of that stuff at my local Metro–PC Indian meals, Knorr, anything. Just McCain’s crap and that Bistro stuff which is just a mere order of magnitude better than Chef-boy-ar-dee.

    I guess Metro is always the last to get the good stuff.

  16. For PC stuff you need to go to Loblaw’s or Provigo. Don’t know if anyone else carries it.

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