Hello from Pseudo-Pizza land!

Let me tell you – I’m like very familiar with the Doughboy. I’m like, tight, with the guy. We’re old friends. I go “heehee” if you stick a finger into my lately increasing beer belly fat. Even though I don’t have a poofy hat. Yet.

But actually, I haven’t really had anything from Pillsbury in quite awhile. So I was happy when a whole load of rolled canisters came in for review the other day. I got several varieties of their instant frozen stuff, but I decided to start off with the Pillsbury Thin Crust Pizza Dough.

I haven’t cracked one of these suckers open in awhile, so I sort of botched opening it up. There’s a tab you pull and it’s supposed to break the seal, allowing you to extract the rolled up dough. For some reason, mine didn’t open so I had to really wrangle it. I would have included a photos of me trying to open it, but you don’t want to see a grown man struggling mightily with a frozen tin can full of dough. I think I need to work out more.

Anyhow, I got the durned thing open and pulled out the dough. I was sort of wondering if it would be very difficult to unroll, but it wasn’t too bad until I got to the end of the roll. It actually wouldn’t unroll at the end without tearing – so I just left it like that, figuring I could just cut it off.

Pillsbury is definitely going for convenience with this Thin Crust Pizza dough. No rolling pin necessary, just lay it out on a cookie sheet, add toppings, and bake at 400 degrees. I haven’t really had too much experience with frozen pizza crust, rollable or not. I’ve often bought Boboli or other pre-baked pseudo-pizza dough circles, but I didn’t really know what to expect with frozen dough.

I heated up the oven, sprayed a cookie sheet with some cooking spray, and laid out the dough. It started to get rather flimsy the moment I got it out flat. They actually say for a crispier crust, you want to pre-bake the dough and THEN put the toppings on. I think if I ever made this again, I’d probably do that. I slathered on about 3/4 cup of spaghetti sauce, some shredded mozzarella cheese and leftover sliced cremini mushrooms. They sent me literature with a whole ton of “suggested” fancy recipes. But I figured I’d make a really basic one to start with.

Continue reading “Pillsbury Frozen Pizza Crust” …

Hello crazies. Since everyone’s gone back to skool[sic, not out sick], I guess I should get back into the normal Cheap Eats swing of things. We’ll start by going the usual route – Frozen Dinners.

Glurgh, my artery just whimpered again.

I got the chance to try out a whole lot of these Claim Jumper Frozen Dinners. Whew – first off, if you didn’t know about the Claim Jumper restaurant chain then you probably have no idea why they’re called that. The dinners are similar to the Marie Callender’s frozen dinners, where they’re inspired by the restaurant.

I used to visit the Claim Jumper near the Puente Hills Mall in Southern California occasionally. What I remember is enormous “cowboy” sized portions, and lots and lots of butter, cream sauce and salt. Like Appleby’s – well, not THAT bad. I just remember they had this fried zucchini appetizer thing that came out and it was as big as baseball bat. Or a canoe. I think I got the lasagna entree. It was as big as the dang LADWP building.

Mutant zucchini’s aside – I was a little hesitant about eating these. The first one I’ve tried, the Chicken Marsala, lived up to the restaurant in question. Gigantic buttery and salty flavors. I wish I hadn’t started with this one because it was by far the worst of the five different varieties.

First off – I just could NOT get past the saltiness. I admit I like things less salty than most, but for food reviews I, er, take saltiness with a grain of salt. It’s like going into combat. I mentally prepare my tongue. Or something like that.

I couldn’t figure out how the % Daily Value could only be 53%, which is already quite gi-normous. Then I realized – this 14 ounce meal is meant for TWO people. Yes, right – you are going to SHARE a frozen meal with someone. Sneaky.

But, because I like to play fair – I’ll try and report on the meal as if the salt content wasn’t overpowering.

The full meal description is “Roasted white meat chicken in a Marsala Sauce over Rigatoni with Baby Bella Mushrooms.” I probably shouldn’t have tried making this particular meal in the microwave. I have had very poor luck with microwaving frozen meals that have any sort of sauce in it, especially those that say to “open and stir” halfway through the cooking time.

It is very difficult to stir a block of chicken and noodle ice. Try it sometime.

Anyhow, I sort of broke it apart and then continued the cooking. I got the result above. The meal actually had a very good smell, although I thought it was very “winey”. The sauce itself was the consistency of salisbury steak gravy but was actually delicious. It was extra buttery and creamy, much to the shagrin of the aforementioned artery.

Continue reading “Claim Jumper Chicken Marsala” …

Here is a confession: I did NOT use this Celeste Frozen Pizza as a frisbee or discus as I was completely intending to. No, I actually ended up eating all of it and enjoying it instead of “going the distance” off of the roof.

I have to admit I’m no pizza expert. Still, after having a surprisingly good experience with the Tony’s Deep Dish Frozen Individual Pizza that was reviewed earlier, I couldn’t resist picking up a little of “Mama” Celeste’s Pizza for One. Mama in quotes, of course. But hey, it does say “Authentic Italian Since 1930″ so there must be a real Mama, right? OK, I don’t know the history of Celeste so I shouldn’t assume that it isn’t a time honored tradition and not a sham.

Anyhow, this review is about the pizza. So I picked up two of them for a dollar each. The one I’m reviewing is the “Deluxe” and they also have plain cheese, pepperoni, and some 3 or 4 cheese blend – I can’t remember exactly. The key is that they’re normally $2 so I previously passed them over. But these were a buck so I figured I’d give it a try.

And first let me say that true Cheap Eaters are going to cringe at actually buying frozen pizza – preferring to make their own pizza at home in various ways. What can I say – I’m not a truly desperate cheap eater. Just an average joe cheap eater who’s sucked in by commercials, bargain bins, and product placement. Boo on me.

This is a 7 inch pizza that weighs about 6.5 ounces. It’s not enormous, but I felt it was decent if it’s a dollar. It comes frozen and you can microwave it or pop it in the oven. I chose the latter, but thinking about it, I should have tried the microwave method since that’s how most people would cook it. Interestingly, they include a weird gray “microwave” disc that you put the pizza on in order to have it brown better. I didn’t use it because I used the conventional oven – but I would assume it works like the gray disc grids that are on the top inside portion of the boxes of some frozen pot pies.

Continue reading “Celeste Pizza For One” …

Wow. I have to admit that its a great time to be a pseudo product review blogger if you really know what you’re doing (but I don’t, so the point is super-moot), because you can get scads of free things in the mail. In the past couple months, I’ve had to turn down several offers, just because there’s no way I could keep up with it – especially with my revised limited posting schedule of one measly review every one or two weeks. I guess I could just write super short reviews (which is what the majority of blogs do), but I’m just not into that. Yet.

But man, is it hard to turn down free food! Especially because this is the Cheap Eats blog where Free Is King. Well, I just couldn’t turn down the new Hibachi House fire-grilled style frozen meals. And I’m glad I didn’t, because they went all out with the package. See below.

This arrived on the doorstep… there were seven meals in all packed into this duffel bag along with dry ice. I’ll probably combine them into 2 or 3 reviews, because although they were all different varieties, they can be grouped together into similar types. It’s basically grilled chicken with rice, shrimp with rice, chicken fried rice or shrimp fried rice. The sauces are really what change.

So what’s the whole idea behind these Hibachi House meals? Well, first let me back up and say that just 2 days after I received the offer to review them, I was watching TV and saw some new Healthy Choice Frozen Dinners in a commercial. They were called “Cafe Steamers“. Pretty weird because the idea seems similar to the fire-grilled food in a steam pouch that is what Hibachi is all about. I guess the competition is so fierce or something in the frozen food biz that everyone’s chomping at the bit to get market share on these fads. The Cafe Steamers even had a similar “strangely shaped” box like Hibachi’s – see below.

Since the chicken, rice and sauce packets are in pouches, there’s no need to make it this weird trapezoidal shape – other than as a marketing thingy. I guess it’s supposed to be a hibachi stove? One other (nerdy designers) thing we noticed about the graphics on the box is that they did some multi layer processing where the pieces of chicken and shrimp are masked out and a highly reflective coating is placed only on them to make it stand out. Yup, nothing escapes our well-trained eyes!

Hm.. my shoulder is fading fast so we’re going to have to speed things up. Lucky, I took so many pictures. Above is how the inside package appears. The main dish is mixed together in the steam pack, while there is a separate package for the sauce. Basic instructions are to make a slit in the main dish pack and microwave it for 6 minutes. Meanwhile defrost the sauce package in hot water. Then you can either mix the sauce in or use it as a dipping sauce.

Continue reading “Hibachi House Teriyaki Chicken” …

Hey there folks. Would you trust a chef with a tomato for a hat?

Apparently, I would. Up for review are these frozen mini Tony’s Deep Dish Pizzas which feature a chubby mustachioed dude wearing a chef’s hat that’s actually an enormous tomato. Uhrg. I’m trying to think of some more tomato chef hat jokes but nothing’s forthcoming, so I’ll skip to the review. (10 Magic Bonus Points if you can make up an interesting joke with tomatoes and chef hats. And please, keep it clean…)

I’ll be the first to admit I’m no expert in pizza. In fact, I’ve almost always followed the Cheap Eats path and avoided the pre-made frozen stuff in lieu of alternatives like the popular Ghetto Pizza. As for authentic restaurant pizza – ah, c’mon… Los Angelenos like me are more apt to put BBQ chicken, goat cheese and arugula on our pies. (I’m sure I’ll get tons of pizza peeps hotly writing in about the tons of places you can get authentic, non-gourmet pizza around L.A.)

But I have to admit that I’ve eyed these small frozen pies everytime I’ve been to Albertson’s in the past several months. They almost always have their own special display outside the frozen aisle, often near the Banquet Frozen Dinners. At a buck each, I really had to use some will power to avoid them. But I caved the other day, after not eating lunch before going to the supermarket (I believe that’s Cheap Eats Manifesto Rule No. 23, NEVER go food shopping on an empty stomach).

So, lucky readers you’re going to get more pics of junk food instead of fiber cereal or boiled vegetables. Hooray!

I actually didn’t even check if they have larger version’s of Tony’s pizza, nor did I check and see what other comparable other brands there are. (I’m sure someone will let me know). There are several different varieties of these smaller Deep Dish Pizzas, including plain cheese, pepperoni and supreme – all the same price. I never understood this Quirk of Frozen Pizza – plain cheese is just as expensive as a combo or supreme. I think it’s like that for many varieties… you just seemed to be getting jacked if you get the plain cheese. I got the Supreme.

Continue reading “Tony’s Deep Dish Pizza” …

Back to frozen food again. I’ve been shunning Banquet meals lately in favor of both Marie Callender’s (finally spelled it right that time!) and Healthy Choice frozen meals. Just for variety of course. Although, lately my “picky” food side has been rearing it’s mid-life crisis head just a little too frequently.

Also, while Banquet is pretty much $1 each every day of the year, you kind of have to wait it out for Marie Callender’s and Healthy Choice to go on sale. On sale where I am is $2 per meal, although I’ve seen them as cheap as $1.50 on occasion.

I have lots of good memories eating the Marie Callender’s Turkey Pot Pie at both the restaurant location and straight outta the microwave at work. But I haven’t picked up one up in a few years, partly because I’d been so turned off from buying the “lesser” pies. But I saw these on sale the other day so I decided to pick one up to relive the good times.

One of the most interesting things about their pot pies is that the microwave instructiosn say NOT to remove the outer cardboard packaging. You basically just open it up but leave the pie inside. I have a feeling this is to get the crust nice and brown… the top of the cardboard container has a “reflective surface grid” as shown in the pic to right (I cut the box open). It faces downward onto the crust.

Whatever it is – it works pretty beautifully. The microwave time is actually one of the longest I’ve ever seen for a frozen dinner – something like 12 minutes on High! I’m always a bit nervous putting anything into the microwave for that long. I have had one instance in the past where the box got slightly “charred”, but this particular time there were no such scary moments. It does tend to smell a bit burnt, sort of like the smell you get when you microwave popcorn. But the pie itself looks quite nice.

Continue reading “Marie Callender Pot Pie” …

I have to admit that I only recently made a batch of Fried Okra because I had seen a snippet of Paula Deen making some on TV. By the way, I can’t stand Paula Deen… I’ve no idea why she got her own live show recently. But I do like some of the Southern recipes she talks about. And she’s somewhat more tolerable that Wolfgang Shmuck…

Sometimes people who read Cheap Eats think that I’m some sort of food or cooking expert. My god, nothing could be farther from the truth. This is the first time I’ve ever tried making Fried Okra, or for that matter anything with okra in it. It came out pretty decent, but I’m not sure how often I would make it.

I know that okra is often used to thicken stews and gumbo, and my mom used to make some sort of goulash type of dish that had okra in it. I have to say that I was never very fond of the mega-glutinous qualities that okra posesses. It’s like they have built in corn starch factories inside of them. Ok, I’m trying not to turn people off them by saying that the inside has the consistency of Slimy Boogers – but it can be extremely off-putting if you haven’t had it before. Although, if you’ve had Natto before, okra slime is a walk in the park…

Continue reading “Fried Okra” …