Part 5 : Banquet Fish Stick Meal
Amazingly, I still haven’t gotten tired of these things.. Well, truthfully, since they’re only a dollar I just bought a bunch of them to try out and have been slowly making my way through ‘em. This one is the Banquet Fish Stick Meal and I was particularly interested in it because of the promise of macaroni and cheese which I’m a huge fan of.

So anyhow, I should mention that for some reason this package came with a FREE Game of Bowling included. Huh? What does Fish Sticks have to do with Bowling? I guess they figure that the weekly highlight of a lonely person who eats frozen dinners is the bowling alley. Geez.

Anyhow, baked this in the oven on a cookie sheet for 22 minutes, and the results were promising. Although, I knew that the meal would suffer a bit because of the brownie (more on that later) which had gotten shot down in the Banquet Pepperoni Pizza Meall.

The fish sticks were surprisingly crunchy… they aren’t the “smooth” battered type you see a lot in frozen food, but rather the crumb kind. Using crumbs on frozen foods is a good way to get a nice crunch if you put the meal in the oven rather than the microwave. But the big problem I had with the fish sticks were that they were so small. These are only slightly bigger than pieces of CHALK for god’s sake. Although you get five of them.

Another issue I had with the fish sticks was that they were nearly all breading. I felt like I was eating bread sticks with a bit of fish baked inside. Granted the breading tastes good, but since the fish isn’t even whole (it’s made with “minced fish”… be very afraid) I think they could squeeze a little more in there.

Now to the Mac ‘N Cheese. Standard Kraft style stuff, slightly gritty for some reason, but overall pretty edible. This was the highlight of the meal for me, mostly because it was a side dish that wasn’t the ubiquitous CORN kernels that Banquet seems to love. Cheesy and good… but I wish there was more than just the small scoop.

As I said before, I already knew the brownie was a bust, because it’s overly sweet and very gooey and sludgey. But in fact, I had a better experience with this one… because I actually took my time eating instead of wolfing the entire meal down at once. When the brownie was allowed to cool, it hardened a bit and became more like a brownie than thick pudding. Not too bad.

In conclusion, not the best of the meals, but certainly not the worst. I suspect most people would get better mileage out of buying bags of fish sticks by themselves and keeping them in the freezer.

Cheap Eats Score: 5/10

(You might also want to read Part I: Banquet Chicken Nugget Meal, Part II: Banquet Salisbury Steak Meal, Part III: Banquet Fried Chicken Meal and Part IV: Banquet Pepperoni Pizza Meal)