Hello, what’s this. I seem to have left our Frozen Dinner poll running on autopilot for a couple months without switching it out. That might be for the best, because it actually took this long to get a sufficient number of responses. I guess frozen dinners aren’t the must-have, technological wonder-food that they were in the 50s anymore…

Anyhow, color me surprised (mangled Heatherism). Dark horse candidate Healthy Choice Frozen Dinners ended up beating out the competition. I had thought for sure that either Michelina or Banquet would have taken the honors. Though, it was quite close between those top 3… they were all within 30 votes of each other. Swanson frozen dinners brought up the rear. I wonder if that has anything to do with my giving their potpies the cold shoulder.

As I’ve said many times before, the Cheap Eats site is about cheap food, not health food. Though, over the course of the year, I’ve managed to sneak in quite a few more healthy choices. That has something to do with the fact that I’ve been having stomach issues the past 2 months. (I can hear the peanut gallery saying “See, I told you all those boxes of macaroni and cheese and instant ramen meals would catch up with you.”)

Continue reading “Healthy Choice wins Poll” …

Wow, I was SO disappointed with these Swanson Pot Pies. I remember eating these as a snack when I was a kid and thinking that they were the best thing in the world. I think they were also only 33 cents or less at the market.

So twenty years later I decided to give them a try again. They couldn’t be THAT bad right? Plus, even with inflation the price of one of these cheapie frozen pot pie ranges from 49 cents to about a buck. Good cheap eats right? Not even close.

Oh, full disclosure: in my salad days at an unamed dot com (where we used to fold 100 dollar greenbacks into paper airplanes, light them on fire and throw them off the balcony), I used to buy the expensive Marie Calendar Chicken Pot Pies and those were pretty durned good. You put them in the microwave for like 5 minutes and the crust is actually nicely browned and crisp and there’s like big chunks of chicken, carrots and potatoes.

The Swanson Turkey Pot Pie, when put into the microwave, nicely exploded into a Simpson-esque radioactive pie disaster. I followed the directions correctly, scoring the top of the pie carefully to vent the steam but that didn’t help at all. Well before the recommended cooking time, I heard sputtering and popping in the microwave. I looked inside and the contents had started to come out all over the plate. I had to keep going though, because the inside was still cold.

Man, this was pretty nasty looking… and you know at Cheap Eats we aren’t that particular. It tasted even worse. The crust was pale and unappetizing. (Later, I over-nuked another one by a few minutes for good measure to try and get it brown. No luck.) Let me tell you what the crust tastes like: it tastes like library paste. Don’t ask me how I know what library paste tastes like.

Continue reading “Swanson Turkey Pot Pie” …

I completely goofed and forgot to post this yesterday. I wanted you to all get fair warning about picking up a FREE Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Cone. Yep, it’s that time of year already.

They’re celebrating 28 years of making their ice cream. The shops should all be open from 12-8pm. I actually have never partaken in this yearly ritual, though I know there are quite a few people who do. It hasn’t been hot enough here lately to get ice cream, but then again I guess who needs a heat wave to enjoy some?

Make sure to check which Ben & Jerry’s stores are actually participating in this giveaway. There are definitely more than a few, say in California where I live, which aren’t giving it away. I looked and for the most part, it’s mostly those which are in amusement parks or baseball stadiums. Yeah, if they honored the giveaway in a stadium full of people they’d go bankrupt.

Price: Free Ice Cream Cone
At: Ben & Jerry’s
Cheap Eats Score: 10/10

I spend a lot of time at the local CostCo, formerly known in my neighborhood as Price Club. Although it seems like there are these amazing bargains in bulk, the key for Cheap Eats is to buy things that you at least have a chance in hell of using up before they go bad. This means no 6 pound blocks of mozarella cheese (my mom bought this, and then proceeded to start handing out 1 pound blocks to me and my brother).

I’ve been getting these Rice Gourmet Chicken Bowls which is made by Delimex, the CostCo store brand. At a cost of nearly $10 for 6 bowls, it’s definitely not the cheapest thing around… it works out to over $1.50 per bowl. Not exactly Cheap Eats, so they get zinged as far as score goes right away. However, since it’s frozen food you can easily use them up before they go bad.

However, I have to say they’re pretty decent in terms of the quality. This is an all in one type of meal that you just pop into the microwave for about 6 minutes or so, and then take it out and stir it up.

The chicken, rice and sauce actually mix up together pretty well. You have to really get in there with a fork and mix it up so that your sauce gets distributed on the rice.

The chicken (breast meat only) actually seems to have been pre-grilled (you can see the marks in the picture). The teriyaki sauce is not overly powerful, which is usually my beef with these type of meals. I don’t know why manufacturers think teriyaki is some sort of super sweet, orange tasting glaze. This sauce has a good soy flavor and is actually a bit gingery which was nice.

The rice can get a bit clumped up depending on the power of your microwave, but it’s not too bad. The veggies (carrots and broccoli) are actually very decent… I’m surprised they don’t taste like mush.

So, if this were like $7 for 6 then it’d get a much higher score. Still, it beats the pants off a lot of frozen meals.

Price: $9-10 for 6 pack
Bought at: CostCo
Cheap Eats Score: 5/10

Well, not only did Dryer’s Ice Cream completely smoke all the competition in our latest food poll, but I inadvertantly chose Haagen Dazs Ice Cream as a competitor. When, in fact, according to the DryersInc site, they also own Haagen Dazs as well as Nestle Ice Cream. Hello, monopoly!

I DID know that the popular Edy’s brand of ice cream is one and the same as Dryer’s Ice Cream. The history of why some people know it as Edy’s and others as Dryer’s is apparently because the original partnership was formed between William Dreyer who made frozen desserts and Joseph Edy who was a candy maker. Nearly 20 years later, in 1947, they agreed to dissolve the partnership, whereby Dreyer retired and handed the biz over to his son while Edy went back to making candy. Dreyers’ son later sold the company and because many people on the east coast still knew the brand as Edy’s, the new owners decided to stick with that same name everywhere east of the Rockies.

In any case, I was pretty sure that Dryer’s would win and I knew that not enough people cared or knew about the “au naturale”allure of Breyer’s Ice Cream (my personal favorite, though why did they choose a name so similar to Dreyer’s??). But I actually thought that Ben & Jerry’s wacky boutique ice cream flavors might be a dark horse candidate. After all they are always mentioned on the Food Network and nearly everyone knows about them. They came close, but no golden ice cream spoon for them.

Thinking about it, I probably should have done popsicles or ice cream bars, instead of just ice cream because there’s more name and shape recognition with them. With ice cream, once it’s out of the tub and into your bowl, there’s nothing (besides taste/texture) to tell you one company’s vanilla from another. But for popsicles and ice cream bars, it’s like, what would YOU do for a Klondike bar…

I got the idea for the new poll because I’ve been watching an excess of Food Network lately. So, basically I wanted to find out who your favorite food network star was. Or if not, then how about who is the least annoying…

I don’t usually review snacks and ice cream but seeing how its summer and my brain is about to melt, the other day we picked up some Jello Pudding Pops. Yes, they make them again… though I didn’t even know they went away actually. But apparently there was even online campaigns to bring them back.

I have some good memories of eating Jello Pudding Pops and its also a bit hard to disassociate them with Bill Cosby slurring face. I would try and imitate him here, but… well, let’s not!

So I had actually forgotten that Pudding Pops actually come in 3 “flavors” in the same box and that you don’t get a choice whether or not to have those three flavors. The flavors are Chocolate, Vanilla, and Chocolate Vanilla Swirl. It’s a bit interesting that they don’t make it so you can buy them separately… I’m not sure what the idea is there. Because I certainly dig the Chocolate kind much more than the Vanilla. The “Swirl” flavor is just OK, I suspect because there’s some chocolatey goodness there which is counterbalanced by the vanilla which I don’t like as much. I dunno the vanilla just seems to have too much artificial vanilla taste to it.

So, we all know that Ice Cream ain’t cheap any more. Those days of getting Drumsticks for a quarter from the ice cream man and a Thrifty’s 15 cent ice cream scoop (a triple scoop for 45 cents!) are over. So I wasn’t too surprised that a box of 12 cost over $4.00. Definitely not your Cheapest Eats, but in the realm of ice cream it’s OK. About 35 cents a pop.

Continue reading “Jello Pudding Pops” …

Well, after the disaster with the Michelina Lasagna Meal I’d almost given up hope on a decent frozen dinner from that company. Several readers noted, however, that I might have bought the wrong TYPE of Michelina meal, as in the Lean Gourmet line. And indeed that seemed to be the case. Like I said I could care less about the calories.

Luckily, I’d only bought 3 of these meals (for the magnificent total of 3 dollars) as a test so I wouldn’t need to slog through all of them if they were really bad. The 2nd one I ate involved some Shrimp Scampi pasta which was actually quite good. Unfortunately, I was so hungry that day that I didn’t get to take pictures of that one before scarfing it down.

So this third frozen dinner is the Michelina Swedish Meatball meal. I really like meatballs in general, however they’re done. A lot of people actually get so called Swedish Meatballs at Ikea, funnily enough. I’ve had good experiences with the kind you buy from CostCo. A friend of mine makes this pretty good recipe with those CostCo meatballs along with ketchup, grape jelly, onions, and bell peppers in a crock pot. Not half bad.

You can also make your own meatballs, much cheaper. I like spaghetti with homemade meatballs quite a bit. I should probably just make my own, right? But in any case here’s what I thought of the frozen Swedish Meatball dinner.

Continue reading “Michelina Swedish Meatball Meal” …