Salutations.

So, I’ve been monkeying around with the new WordPress install that I grumbled about earlier. Surprisingly, I’ve been finding it hasn’t been grinding my Cheap Eats blogging mojo down.

If anything, it’s made it easier to make posts. There are still a lot of things I hate about it, but it’ll work for now.

I’ve also had some time to think, which is likely a dangerous thing. Deep thinking is not my strong suit. And anyway, I hate to wear neckties.

But yes, I got to thinking that as much as I hate to acknowledge the folks who dislike the “windbaggy” part of this blog, they probably have a sixteenth of a point. In particular, I’ve been complaining too much.

No one likes a complainer.

That is, except my secret horde of Cheap Eats zombie groupies that follow me around the Dollar Store documenting my every move. “Oooh, is he going to grab the Beanee Weenne? Or the Smoked Oysters?

And at night, I lock my lovely food zombie groupies in the pantry where they order my Earthquake food by expiration date. They also type up my ingredients list which is handy because I get tired of writing Thiamine Mononitrate and Disodium Phosphate over and over again.

Yes, zombie groupies are awesome. But even they get tired of me complaining. So I’ll try to wankle and complain less. And write more reviews. Better ones. With better sentences and more grammatically correct.

And I’ll also try to save America from its own gluttony, a la Jamie Oliver, by importing 55 herds of fresh Swedish ox-fish which poop out dynamically balanced meals of meat-veg that school kids will love to eat.

And also, I’ll sail my bathtub to Iceland to put out the volcano so planes can get up in the air already and bring us our imported frozen meat pies, Cadbury bars and haggis.

And so on.

(I lied about the Haggis, I don’t think they can import that to the U.S.)

Speaking of Haggis, this Cook’s Classics Beef Ravioli sure does NOT have anything to with that.

I often get suckered into buying cheap crappy canned food. For some reason, I have this hopeful thought every time I pick up a can of cheap food that it will somehow bring about Everlasting World Peace. But it never quite does. Go figure.

This was pretty cheap at 69 cents for a can. I’m trying to recall if the standard Chef Boyardee Ravioli gets down that far. I think it does at certain stores, but the price I see is usually around a buck. I figured that if this was anywhere similar to Chef Boyardee, I should just put this stuff in the earthquake pantry. I love to buy these off brands for that purpose.

But this Cook’s Classics ravioli really confused me. It smelled exactly like Chef Boyardee’s. The sauce was pretty much the same – gloopy, orange corn starchized puke with bits of “Meat” floating around. The raviolis seemed about the same too – little 1.5 inch pillows of bland, slightly stale-tasting, crackerish (hint, the ingredient after beef is “crackermeal”) paste-pouches.

But the more I ate, the less I liked it. This is somewhat contrary to what usually happens with this kind of food-travesty-in-a-can. What happens normally is that after awhile your taste buds sort of become immune to the crap assaulting it. Either that, or the episode of So You Think You Can Dance you’re watching starts to really heat up, and you forget about meat paste pouches so you can concentrate on all that revealed flesh jiggling onscreen.

Come on. You don’t watch it for the dancing. ‘Fess up.

But truly, I did sort of become more disappointed as the minutes went by. I went from about a 7 score, to a 5 score and finally to a 4. Then Lost came on the TV and I forgot all about scores, as I continued my weekly daydream about kidnapping the cast and holding them hostage in my pantry so that my zombie groupies would have something good to munch on while they’re typing up my reviews.

I think one of the issues is that there is this tangy aftertaste that I can’t quite describe. Kind of like a sour pickle, if a sour pickle was a sauce-drenched pouch of beef paste. Or maybe a cross between a tomato and a pile of metal shavings, if a tomato and a pile of metal shavings was a sauce-drenched pouch of beef paste.

Funny Man needs to end this review soon.

Without further ado, I will now state that this Cook’s Classics Beef Ravioli did not completely suck. However, I would not really suggest you eat this if you are alive.

What I mean to say, is that, zombies and food-reviewing undead, if they are reading this, should immediately go to the Dollar Store and purchase cans of this to take back to their lairs to consume instead of their normal dinner of human flesh.

(If this works, you can thank me later for saving mankind.)

Price: $0.69 for 15 oz
Found At: Fresh & Easy
Cheap Eats Score: 4/10