I think I’m suffering from selective pasta amnesia.

The reason I think a part of my brain is on the fritz is that, try as I might, I don’t recall Spaghettios that included “donut holes” in the mix along with the hoops.

What in the world is going on?

I’m just an Unfrozen Caveman Cheap Eats Editor. All these extra pasta shapes confuse me.

To be honest, I probably haven’t had Spaghettios since my youthful Camping Days – and probably only a few times at that. This kind of pasta in a can was banned in our household except during special motorhome trips when it just felt right to eat. It’s probably for the best anyway, because as I’ve mentioned, I’ve always felt bad after eating Chef Boyardee and similar products.

Anyhow, back to the stupefying inclusion of the inner pasta dots along with the O’s. I’m surprised there aren’t riots in the streets. If you look at the picture on the can, there aren’t any little pasta dots. I just see the O’s, meatballs, and gooey, splashing sauce. As a sidenote: the “liveliness” of the pasta in the picture is a little disturbing. It almost looks like it’s alive. Some sort of viral spaghetti and meatballs that’s about to latch onto your face and telepathically feed you nightmares featuring irate Italian chefs waving cleavers. The Horror.

But yep, there are no pasta dots in the can picture. I wish the product was called Spaghettios with Dots and Meatballs so I wouldn’t get confused. I guess it makes since for them to include them in the can, otherwise they’d go to waste. Last I checked, there is no Home for Wayward Pasta Dots just yet. And they taste pretty much the same.

Oh, the taste. I’ve often written about my dislike of “sweet” things – this usually applies to tomato based products as well. There are only a few brands of spaghetti sauce that we can tolerate (Hunt’s in a can is one of them).

But for some reason, I rather enjoy the oversweetened orangey sauce that comes in these products. I’m not quite sure why, maybe my Sweet taste buds get all nostalgic for it. It has a fairly decent flavor, and I like that it’s very cheesey tasting. Afterwards, I had a slight taste of tin can in my mouth that was difficult to wash out. I find this often happens with canned food that contains tomato products. It wasn’t as bad as some of the other canned tomato items, but it was still noticeable.

The meatballs are tiny 3/4 inch perfect spheres of pureed beef-water-breadcrumb mixture. Incidentally, I keep wanting to type “metaballs” instead of “meatballs“. Something to do with a habit of typing “metadata” I guess. Hmm… MetaMeatBalls.

The noodles are pretty much your plain Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup type of soft, overcooked pasta product. They aren’t spectacular, and you pretty much don’t even notice much about them. It’s like they’re just there to fill up the rest of the empty space that the metameatballs don’t cover.

Anyhow, I guess you aren’t going for texture in this product. I pretty much just wolf the whole thing down – if it wasn’t for the meatballs, I wouldn’t even chew.

The price on this can was a buck fifty at F&E, which I thought at first was kind of reasonable. However, the other day, I think I saw a 26 oz. can of Spaghettios (nearly twice as large) for only a dollar. But I don’t recall if it was plain Spaghettios or if it had the meatballs in it. Surely the meatball variety costs more? Anyhow, the end result is that I upped the review score on this a bit because I’m assuming you can get it for cheaper than I did.

So the surprising thing is that I didn’t feel ill at all after eating this. I don’t know what’s happened. It’s either that they’ve done something to the main recipe over the years to prevent it from irritating my bowels, or my stomach has taken a strange liking to these canned spaghetti products.

For the sake of my health, I sincerely hope it’s not the latter. The last thing I need is the OK to ingest this stuff on a daily basis. It’s almost like it was a GOOD thing that it used to make me feel sick – that way I didn’t eat it very often. As for the stupidity of eating things that you know make you sick – I’m like one of those folks who occasionally hit their heads against the kitchen counter to see if there’s a different result than the last time.

Actually, I’ve been thinking maybe my pasta shape amnesia has been brought on by that very action of me smacking my head on the counter. Or maybe, the dots aren’t really there and I’m just hallucinating them!

All in a day’s work.

Price: $1.50 for 4.75 oz. can
Found At: Fresh and Easy
Cheap Eats Score: 6/10

Remind me to get pissed off at food more often.

The other day I was sitting down to watch a hockey game. I had procurred one of those prepared meals from Fresh and Easy – this one was an enormous lasagna about the size of a small third world country. OMG, it was horrible, horrible, horrible. I’ve had really good experiences with F&E stuff, but their spaghetti meal is crap and this lasagna was probably the worst I’ve ever had EVER (a review is probably upcoming, if I can bring myself to revisit the horror).

Anyhow, here I was with a hockey game and nothing to eat. Farketty fark. I started to get mad. And when I get mad, instead of getting even, I usually cook something (I guess that is sort of getting even with the food). Usually something crazy, or at least something I haven’t tried before.

That something was Deep Dish Pizza.

I had just made up a batch of pizza dough the previous day, so I had the crust covered. I’ve always wanted to try to make one of these deep dish pizza things. I didn’t have the exact ingredients, but I decided to give it a go. In between the first and second period of the game, I set me up a cast iron pan with olive oil, the dough, cheese (I didn’t have Moz, only Jack Cheese), cooked sausage, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, bit of leftover spag sauce, some canned parm cheese.

Then I whacked it in the oven. It’s fun to whack things in the oven when you’re mad.

I came back during the commericals to find a pretty good approximation of a deep dish pizza. I know it’s not like the kind you’d get in Chicago, but I thought it was pretty darn good for being a first try.

After inhaling about three slices, I cut up the remainder and put it in the fridge for leftovers the next day. They actually held up pretty well which surprised me – as the pizza cools it solidifies, allowing you to move it around more easily. When I first took it out of the oven, it had been a little wet.

For those who make their own deep dish pizza, I had a question: do you cover deep dish pizza with aluminum foil while baking? I thought of doing this, but didn’t. Because of that, the crust got a little too crispy, though it wasn’t bad.

Next time, I also would probably omit the extra spaghetti sauce and just add more chopped tomatoes. The mushrooms were uncooked which was a mistake that I should’ve caught – that extra water came out and added too much moisture. I’d also use mozzarella cheese, and more of it. I think I didn’t use enough cheese. You can never have too much cheese.

Other than these minor issues, I thought it was surprisingly good.

Oh, and we won the hockey game.

Glue.

That would be how I would describe this Fresh and Easy Spaghetti with Meat Sauce if I could only use a single word.

On the subject of less words: I’ve noticed that my reviews here are often long-winded and gratuitously long. I was thinking maybe I should start up some sort of “25 Word Reviews” on Cheap Eats in order to both save my time and your sanity. Anyhow, that’s Cheap Food for thought.

Before I begin to give this spaghetti meal a well-deserved drubbing, I just want to remind everybody that I’m the latest Fresh and Easy fanboy to be converted to their prepared foods. I love Fresh and Easy so much that I wrote a love letter to them earlier. I just want to get that out into the open in case you think I’m backsliding there. One crappy meal isn’t going to change my love for them. Hmm…. that sounds like song lyrics. But I’ll spare you the horror…

Truthfully, a majority of their stuff is really good and cheap – especially if you can sneak in between the gargantuan whales who crowd the F&E discount bin. Luckily, I have skinny arms so I can snake my way in and grab some of the discounted food. On occasion, however, I’ve grabbed a whale flipper by mistake.

This meal is a refrigerated, fully cooked meal of Spaghetti with Meat Sauce. I have to admit this wasn’t my first choice, but it’s what I was able to grab and it was fairly cheap at a dollar fifty for 12 oz. of food. So I went with it.

I somewhat regret it.

Now, I’ve had meals like this before – usually frozen, but sometimes fresh. And the biggest concern with pre-cooked spaghetti is that if it’s not done correctly, it deteriorates or gets clumped together. The taste of the sauce is usually not a problem – it’s the consistency of the noodles which is crucial.

This spaghetti tasted like glue.

It could also be because it was getting near it’s due date, but this spaghetti just tasted horrible. It was like someone got a bushel of hot cooked spaghetti and left it out for a few hours so that it congealed together. I know fricken Alton Brown and all the other fun-alicious Food Network chefs say never to rinse hot cooked pasta. However, if it’s going to be for a prepared meal like this, and you don’t rinse and cool it correctly, it’s going to turn into glue.

But you can see from the picture above that it looks pretty decent. The overall flavor of the sauce was: Meh, just OK. It had a normal tomato taste, not heavily spiced, and in fact a little on the bland side. Which is saying quite a bit for me, since I usually think things are too salty or spiced. The sauce featured ground beef, onions and interestingly – carrots. That sorta came out of left field. Although we sometimes do put carrots in our homemade spaghetti sauce, i’ve never really seen it in prepared sauces. That was actually quite different, and it made me want to try it again.

The noodles, as I mentioned, were pretty horrible. I actually had to add about 1/4 cup or more of water to the sauce, plus some olive oil to get it palatable. Spaghetti should not stick to the roof of your mouth in most universes.

Overall, this spaghetti survived a truly low score only because it was so cheap at $1.50. Still: I think I could make better Spaghetti in my sleep. I was actually a little disappointed because I’ve had some of Fresh and Easy’s other prepared noodle meals, such as the Chicken Parmigiana, and the noodles were fine. I believe with these company branded prepared meals, there are going to be occasions where you just get a bad one. So I’ve been meaning to try it again just to see if the one I got was a dud. But it hasn’t gone on sale in the discount bin again. I guess I’ll post an update if I try it again. Toodle-oo, Mr. Glue…

Price: $1.50 for 12 oz. (MSRP $3)
Found At: Fresh and Easy
Cheap Eats Score: 3/10

[Editor's Note: F&E Is pretty damn COOL. I only hope that enough people patronize the one I'm at so that it doesn't shut down. If it shuts down I'm going to be crying for a long, long time.]

So it ain’t the prettiest of meals, these leftover Stuffed Bell Peppers. But they’ll do in a pinch for lunch the next day. We make stuffed cabbage more frequently than the peppers, since we have extra cabbage more frequentlyin the fridge. But when there’s a sale on green bell peppers, we usually plan a stuffed pepper night. And the next day I’m rewarded with Leftovers for Lunch.

Lately, I’ve been on a ground turkey kick – previously we’d go with a mixture of 2 parts ground beef to 1 part ground pork. But I’ve found the ground turkey works just as well – you can also mix it with the pork to give it some tenderness, but it’s not really necessary. We add cooked rice and sauteed onions (cooked until they’re very soft) to make the meatball interior mixture less dry. Maybe add some bread crumbs, toss in an egg or two for binding power. Fill up the peppers, add tomatoes and tomato paste (or tomato paste diluted with water) plus chicken stock and throw it in a big pot. That’s pretty much it.

The next day, the stuffed peppers will sometimes taste better now that the flavors have had a longer chance to meld. Inevitably, you’ll have some “pepper” breakdown – they can get a little mushy and the meatball mixture tends to fall out of the pepper. That never bothered me, though. It becomes more of a tomato pepper meatball stew, which is fine with me for a quick lunch the next day.

Once upon a time there was a woman who constructed a house made entirely of Olives. Black olives, green olives, kalamata olives, stuffed olives filled with pimientos, cheese and garlic and raw uncured olives (not recommended for eating). The olive house, which covered 1500 square feet and included a peaked roof, was held together with an insane amount of cream cheese and liver pate. Each corner of the house featured a Dirty Martini bar. She wore dresses woven entirely out of olive branches with olives for buttons.

This is not her story.

I’m going to apologize in advance for this post – I’m not an olive expert. I like them well enough, but I’ve never really paid attention to the different types. I know the standard black olives that go on top of wannabe enchiladas and into gooey 7-layer dip. The pic above is your standard whole pitted black olives that I like to slice up and put into pasta salad. And so on.

My parents have had an olive tree on their front lawn ever since I can remember – I guess that would be over 35 years. It’s smack dab in the middle of the lawn and for some reason, it’s outlasted pretty much every other tree on their property. I remember ducking under the overhanging branches laden with fruit whilst mowing the lawn (non-electric mower, OMG, you can’t imagine the horror).

When the olives ripened and dropped, they’d stain the sidewalk and driveway if they were stepped on. I can’t imagine why they didn’t cut the fricken tree down because of the nuisance. I think they had a psychological attachment to the tree. Maybe the whole peace symbol thingy.

I always wondered why these “olives” were so green – at the time my knowledge was limited to black olives out of a can. Several times, I remember my parents getting the bright idea of curing their own olives. They did it the traditional way using a lye solution. As a kid, I never understood how it was that they were cured by putting it into a poisonous solution that would burn you. Actually, it still amazes me that this is the way a lot of olives are cured.

Anyhow, so the question is: are Olives a good candidate for Cheap Eats?

I believe the answer is yes, in most cases.

I like to keep at least a can of black olives and a jar of the green Spanish style olives in the pantry at all times. They last for a long, long time. Even after you open a can of olives, they last a heck of a long time when stored in the fridge properly. I sometimes splurge on the Kalamata olives at TJs or Whole Foods, but for the most part, I stick with whole, pitted black olives in a can.

Olives are just a really versatile food – you can snack on them whole, slice them up for salads, mix them into pasta, cook them in a sauce, use them as a topping for party food (dips are a fave), and serve them as part of an antipasto. I don’t really buy the stuffed olives frequently, but there are millions of different varieties of those should you be in need of some quick appetizers. I had some Habanero cheese stuffed ones the other day – wooo, they were good.

One of my favorite things to do is to chop olives and add them to sandwiches. Once upon a millenium, there used to be a chain store called Fedco. If memory serves me correctly (and it never does), this was my first experience with green olives. They used to have an item called a Sandini Sandwich that had green olives in a mayo spread. I like making a similar poor-boy style sandwich with turkey or ham and olive spread. Just chop up the olives and mix them with mayo. Makes the sandwich taste sort of tangy and refreshing. It’s almost like relish, but it tastes better to me.

For standard canned black olives, I usually buy the whole ones as opposed to the sliced or chopped. The reason is that you can cut up whole olives, but you can’t put sliced ones back together into whole ones. I mean, unless you’re some kind of Wizard (I guess Harry Potter might incant Olivus Reparatus, but then I’m just a Muggle). In addition, I like to slice up olives thicker than the pre-sliced olives from cans.

If you buy whole green Spanish olives with the pits still in them, it can be cheaper than pitted green olives. The issue is getting the pits out. Previously, I’d tried to cut the exterior off which took forever. It was like carving a mini-turkey. A better way to do it, especially if the olives are on the firmer side, is to smack them with the flat blade of a kitchen knife. You do it much like the method for smacking garlic cloves to remove the skin. Smacking the olives should cause the pit and meat to separate pretty easily so that you can just pick out the pit. Hm… did I just say “Smacking Olives”? Geez. Oh yes, smack my olives, baby…

The one issue about olives for me is that depending on what kind you’re looking for, they can be rather pricey. The Kalamata and stuffed olives will set you back quite a bit. But the standard canned black olives aren’t that expensive – a standard six ounce can of whole black olives should set you back anywhere between $.50 and $1.50. When you open a can, store the unused remainder with its liquid in a glass storage container or a jar. It’ll last for quite awhile. I spoon a few out, chop them up, and throw them into whatever recipe I’m making.

And no, despite what you may think, I do not have an olive or olive oil fetish. And yes, those things do exist.

I’ve been sort of sitting on these Burger King Onion Ring Snacks. I don’t mean actually sitting on them as in squatting and placing my butt-rear directly over these holes, er, rings, er, roundish snack things. (Hey, that rhymes!) I mean I’ve kept them in the dollar store food Cheap Eats review cache for a rainy day. They just seemed like such an easy review to put up, and I had great gasping plans for them.

But seeing as I’m gasping in other ways due to the 98 degree heat today, I figured I might as well have a go at them. Give it the old college try. You know. Cram as many onion rings into my mouth as possible and then sit back and watch a hockey playoff game or two. See if I can shoot a stream of pee through the ring. Purely puerile things that stifling heat makes you do.

These are Burger King branded snack chips that are supposed to be the equivalent of their onion rings. Now, I haven’t been to BK in awhile, although it’s not because I dislike the food. I’m sorta ambivalent toward their offerings, no lingering hate here. Apparently, they have made a mess of their commercials though, according to the preliminary results of the “Worst Fast Food Commercials” poll that’s running. I haven’t seen too many BK commercials at all lately – it’s kinda weird.

But anyhow, these onion ring snacks actually look surprisingly close to what I’m assuming their real onion rings would look like. They’re sort of the size of the smaller onion rings you might get in an order, from about 1-2 inches in diameter. That’s 1-2 inches across, for those of you who failed math like I did.

I actually find it quite interesting that the rings are not all the exact same size. They must have some sort of onion-ring-diameter randomizer function embedded into the extruder machine. I bet you it’s patented, which is unfortunate because I was just about to submit that idea to one of those “Invention Patent” websites and watch the pennies roll in. Jingle, jingle.

I guess the big question you’ve been patiently waiting for me to answer is: How are these compared to Funyuns?

Besides having a name that’s 95% better grammatically speaking (I can only imagine how many gallons of paint one has to gulp in order to come up with a proper butcherizing of the name “Funyuns”), the BK Onion Ring snacks are decidedly darker and browner in color. The texture of the outside of the ring looks very similar to the breading on an onion ring. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the appearance.

They also appear to be “chunkier” than Funyuns – I know real onion slices are pretty flat and skinny, so maybe they’re trying to imitate a really thick batter. Actually, if they were shooting a(nother) remake of “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” next door (and they’ve been known to shoot Hollywood drivel films all around our area), I might be tempted to think these were Cinnamon Cheerios cereal props. They look an awful lot like them.

As far as texture goes, they aren’t that dense like Cheetos, but are more like cheese puffs. Not as light as the puffs, though – I would say they fall somewhere in between. They have a nice crunch to them – I want to say they’ve got around the same crunch as Funyuns do. Dang it, I keep typing FunyuMs. Stupid ‘N’ and ‘M’ close together on the keyboard. Where’s my Dvorak…

As for taste, they’ve got a good strong onion flavor – no doubt enhanced suitably by a few tablespoons of MSG. But not the worst tasting onion chips I’ve ever had. I wish I had some Funyuns so I could test them side by side. If memory serves me correctly, and it never does, I think Funyuns were actually saltier than these BK Onion Ring chips. I was quite surprised I didn’t have to immediately take a drink after eating these. Well, OK, I did have to run to get a drink after about six of the rings. That MSG sort of creeps up on you all sudden-like.

In conclusion, I think that I was suckered into buying these onion ring snacks just because they had the Burger King name on them. In that respect, their evil corporate marketing machinations worked beautifully. I’m going to have to take some of those new Name Brand De-Sensitizer pills I’ve been hearing so much about. But I guess I was fairly surprised that the actual product was decent and they went to some trouble to make it interesting instead of just slapping their name on a bunch of baked cornholes.

Sorry, I meant corn rings. And I just realized I used the words slapping and cornhole in that sentence.

Sigh, time to call it a day – the heat is Funyunizing my brain.

Price: $1.00 for 3 oz.
Found At: Dollar Store
Cheap Eats Score: 6/10

[Editor's Note: I apologize for not being able to come up with a suitable joke incorporating "Have It Your Way" and cornhole ring. These things just do not come naturally to me.]

URGH I didn’t really feel like writing a novel today (again). So we’re going with Leftovers for Lunch. While we do cook at home fairly often, we still hit the restaurants sometimes for meals throughout the week. I know that J food isn’t the cheapest type around – but what are you gonna do. Yes, I know I could drive 10 minutes to my mom’s house and ask her to cook Japanese food, but sometimes you don’t want to do that. =)

Anyhow, we find that even with a more expensive restaurant, taking home the leftovers can cut a chunk off of the higher price. Or, at least it’ll make you feel like you saved a little extra. It helps that we’re not the biggest eaters on the planet, so we usually do have leftovers. The trick is to “doctor up” the leftovers at home. I’m not talking about making it look pretty, although that’s another good way to make cheap food taste better. I mean just add stuff to it.

One of our favorites to fix up is soup or stew. To this leftover Sukiyaki I added a pack of enoki mushrooms, some chicken stock to thin it out (often necessary when you’ve got leftover soup) and a small pack of cooked udon. It made a pretty good lunch. One trick for couples who get tired of eating the same leftovers from last night – switch and eat your partners leftover meal. Works pretty well – except when the leftover meal is so good you don’t WANT to switch, hehe.