It appears I have been assimilated.

… into the Cult of the Sardine, that is. I no longer get up in the morning to eat Frosted Flakes. I start off the day with a big bowl of King Oscar Sardines. Finest Brisling Sardines, I might add. Straight outta the can. If I’m feeling frisky, I chop up some green onion to top it off with. Forget milk, it doesn’t go well with sardines.

(All around the world, cows just cried a tear.)

Around 11 in the morning I start to get the munchies. I used to snack on some Fiddle Faddle or Crunch and Munch, but now I just break open another tin of sardines. Seeya, carbs. I plan to eat half and save the remainder for a midnight snack. I go for the Mediterranean Style King Oscar Sardines this time. Ooh, it has red bell pepper and black olives. It’s like a party in my mouth and Jack (sic) Cousteau is invited. Pass the clam dip, Zissou.

I decide to hit the Long Beach Aquarium for lunch. I know what you’re thinking – no trip to the aquarium is complete without a meal of fish and chips (fish sticks = chopped and formed haddock filets from Alaska). I decide to bypass the tradition and sneak in another tin of King Oscar sardines underneath my jacket. Since I’m in a spicy mood, I bring along the Gourmet Chipotle Sauce flavor. I’m surprised that the Chipotle taste actually matches up OK with fish. It goes down really well, especially after a nice swig of bat ray feeding tank water. But I have to hightail it outta there since the guards don’t take kindly to me feeding Chipotle sardines to the jellyfish.

A little kid points at me while I’m running and asks his mom, “Why does the man smell like fish?” A word to the wise: do not run with an empty tin filled with sardine juice. You will spill it all over you.

Later at home, after watching The Blue Planet for the 54th time, I make some dinner plans. Here is the deal. I’m going to have some Balsamic Vinaigrette King Oscar Sardines for a fishy “side salad” and then go with Dijon Mustard King Oscar Sardines for the main course. This is like the most amazing fishfeast I’ve ever had. Tender fishies lovingly dunked in flavorful gravy.

The cat comes by to say hello. I ignore it. Sardines, my Precious, sardines.

Finally, to top off another excellent sardine filled day, I make a sardine omelette for dessert using the leftover tin from my morning snack. If you haven’t tried this, you should. You actually pour in the juice from the sardine into the egg mixture. I first saw it on a Japanese TV show where they said that sardine juice from a can was one of the best “brain foods” you could eat.

I wouldn’t make stuff like this up. Dude.

OK, it is back to Reality. The non-sardine filled variety of Reality. Well, ok, just a few sardines in this Reality. I’ve tried most of the flavors of the King Oscar Sardines sent in for review, and can honestly say these are some of the best I’ve had. I guess it isn’t too hard to top bulk sardines purchased at the Dollar Store. But these were pretty darn good – tender, delicate and for the most part, intact. They have a slightly salty flavor but aren’t as strongly fishy as some of the other ones I’ve had. Just don’t get the oil on your clothes!

They’re from Norway and are the Brisling variety (according to the package they’re smaller and more delicate than the conventional sardines). By the way, there’s an old commercial for them if you would like to watch. There’s also a Sardine Diet, which just goes to show you that I’m not so crazy after all. Woah. I guess I AM crazy.

They have some that are “two layer” and others in “one layer”. As far as quality goes, these pretty much kick ass – for price, I think it’s going to be a bit spendy. You might be able to get a one layer can for around two bucks or less, especially if you buy them by the case. Which is something I’m going to have to consider, seeing as my Reality has been painted sardine-colored lately.

Price: Free
Found At: Sent in for review
Cheap Eats Score: 7/10

[Editor's Note: My new year's resolution was to butcher the English language while cramming as many non sequitur phrases into reviews as possible. I like to make them almost completely unpalatable so that Grandma Jekeriah from Tennessee does not email me thinking I own Banquet Frozen Meals. Look for reviews to get crazier and krazier and querazier as the year goes by. Thank you very much.]

Some quickie Cheap Eats news: it appears the price of your favorite daily morning Kellogg’s cereal may be going up. I read about it on Iateapie today. While the increase will only be in the single digit percentages, it’s going to affect most of their cereals (exceptions are Special K, All-Bran). Price increases will be across the board for stores apparently.

As the article notes, it’ll be interesting to see what General Mills thinks of the price rise. The reason for the increase is mainly the cost of ingredients. I don’t eat a lot of dry cereal, so I can’t say how much it’ll affect us. But I guess if you have 10 kids and buy boxes and boxes of cereal a week, then you might notice the difference.

Wait, does this include Pop Tarts?

Oh, woe is me.

Source: Yahoo Finance via Tanya from Iateapie

I’m not going to lie to you. I like the word “Kibbles.”

It just rolls off the tongue nicely, like a bottle of Albertsons vodka mixed with OJ (not Simpson). It also rhymes with Tribbles, which is handy in case I’m ever writing a Star Trek limerick. Finally, it goes along nicely with the word “Bits.” This gives you the canine culinary creation: Kibbles ‘n Bits.

What does Hartford House Beef Stew have to do with Kibbles ‘n Bits?

Come on, Eileen. You can do the math yourself…

Truth be told, this can of stew was part of my earthquake food supply kit. But seeing as how the date on the can was getting a little close to the expiration date (really, 1/13/11 is coming up way faster than you think), I thought I’d crack it open and have some stew on a cold, windy day.

Thank god I opened it now, because if I had to eat this after an earthquake, I might throw it up. Now I can go and replace it with something tame like Spam or Vienna Sausages.

Do you know the buttery, fungus paste that grows between your toes if you don’t take a shower for a few days? Oh no, it doesn’t taste anything like that. Not that I would compare it to something like that, on penalty of being banned for life from the Dollar Store by the cabal of food manufacturers that puts out this crud. I smell libel, I smell suit.

No, this was probably not as bad as I’m making it out to be. But after eating luxurious frozen food for a few weeks, it was rather disturbing.

On the surface, this is your typical canned beef stew with potatoes, carrots, and “meat”. Speaking of “on the surface”, when I first wrestled the can open (note to self: make sure to include high quality can opener in emergency earthquake supply) there was about a 1/4 cup worth of orange blobbity on the top of the can. Oh cool, I thought – some pureed carrots to thicken the stew. Not so fast, Bugs Bunny.

I dunno what it really was – probably a combination of lard, grease, oil, tomato paste and spices. I mean, I see a bit of that inside the top of nearly every can of Chili or soup I open up. But there was just gobs and gobs of that orange stuff, and it was harder than Ronald McDonald’s arteries after ingesting 55 Big Macs.

But you know what they say – if you’re going to play with fire, you might as well stick your whole hand in. Uh, any 10 year old kids, disregard that last sentence. I scooped most of the orange goo back into the can and just heated it up. Once I got it all mixed up, the orange color wasn’t as noticeable. The stew took on the consistency of glue, or maybe some of that Fix-All that we use to fill up holes in the wall. At least it wasn’t gritty like spackle.

I guess the potato pieces were pretty standard, and the carrot pieces, while small and pasty, were at least unremarkable enough that I could eat them. The sauce had a strange flavor, somewhat like buttered popcorn mixed with coagulated blood. I think it has something to do with the “tin can” effect, where you get foods picking up a metallic taste. It was VERY noticeable. I tasted it in the sauce and meat mostly.

Now, that meat – here’s where we get into the Kibbles part. It was like eating dog food. I’m not claiming that Hormel Chili or any of those other cans of stew have superb chunks of meat. But these little beef shmears were like the tiny hairball gems that my cat upchucks every so often. I just could not get past the taste and texture. Maybe if they were larger, or if they stuck some more spices in it to fake out my taste buds. Anything else, please, anything.

Would I eat this if I was starving? Sure. Last I checked, eating bad stew is an excellent alternative to starving. But I think I’m going to have to go back to the dollar store to get something else. Sorry, Hartford House (I seem to have liked your Corned Beef Hash better). It’s probably unfair to compare this to Kibbles ‘n Bits. I don’t even have a dog. But if I did, I think I would trade him his Kibbles for this stew.

Price: $1
Found At: Dollar Store
Cheap Eats Score: 1/10

And a Happy Stuffed Sausage Bread New Year to you too.

I had a nice little dollar store Cheap Eats post all ready to go today. But that’s gotten preempted (much like all my favorite shows are preempted by stupid American Football nowadays) by some crazy Stromboli action.

I know it’s hard to believe, what with my dumblefingery baking skills, but I actually made a practical approximation of a Sausage Stromboli just an hour ago in the oven. I couldn’t believe it either. I hope this is a harbinger of Cheap Eats Baking to come for 2009.

I know you’re supposed to use a pizza stone for this kind of stuff, but I was able to make one using just a Silpat on top of a cookie baking sheet. I think because the dough was thin, it didn’t matter as much. It didn’t have as crunchy a crust as a real pizza, and the cheese leaked out of the bottom, but the end result was pretty amazing. I did use a broiler tray for steam this time, so maybe that helped the crust. This one had canned tomatoes, jack cheese and cooked Italian sausage in it.

It’s about this point that I need to confess that the recipe for the stromboli comes straight outta Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day (abbreviated as AB5MD from now on) which I got for Xmas. I really think they should’ve taken out the word “Artisan” – it tends to scare non-bakers like me away. At first I thought it was some frou-frou book written by a poofy-hatted chef in Limoges. They should’ve just said Amazing Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.

I hate to be one of those “book boosters”, but this bread tome is pretty damn good. I started off before this book going down the Jim Lahey No-Knead route (google it, for the NY times article, since the bastards prevent hotlinking). That recipe was the revelation, and this book extended it by letting you keep batches of pre-mixed dough in the fridge for 2 weeks.

Earlier, I’d experimented with making your own yeast – but I’ll save that topic for another day. Plus, it’s a little more inconvenient and requires more time. I just used the standard yeast packets.

I’m only on the basic master recipe in AB5MD which uses water, salt, unbleached white flour and storebought yeast. But it’s been good enough for most everything – however, I was surprised it worked well for the Stromboli because I didn’t have a pizza stone. Also, I’ve been using a combination of the Lahey method and AB5MD method for all the bread. Basically, I said forget the pizza stone and used a non-stick cast iron pot like Lahey recommended. Use the cover for 1/2 the cooking time and you don’t really need to use a steam tray. The bread comes out pretty good, though not perfect. The dough recipe is just an ordinary 6-3-3-13. That’s 6 cups lukewarm water, 3 tbsp yeast, 3 tbsp kosher salt, 13 cups flour. Mix it, cover and let it stand for 2 hours and put it in the fridge. That is all – enough dough for 8 1lb loaves. Halve the recipe if it’s too much to store.

I’ll try get a full recipe up for the stromboli, maybe an AB5MD book review as well, when I get to the other enriched doughs of later chapters. For now, it’s pretty darn good and cheap eats. It’s great to be able to make larger batches in advance instead of just one at a time like the Lahey method I was using.

Hullo. I don’t usually wax (on and off, Karate Kid style) poetically about frozen food. Especially high end stuff like these Bertolli Frozen Entrees.

But holy rigatoni, these are probably the best frozen meals I’ve had in a while. And we try a lot of frozen food.

Granted, when you’re eating Banquet Meals on a regular basis, you’re probably going to be blown away just a little bit by such luxurious things as whole cherry tomatoes and grilled steak.

I was sent a few of these Bertolli Entrees and decided to try the Steak, Rigatoni & Portabello Mushrooms Skillet Meal. They come in a bag, weigh 2 pounds, and cost oodles more than a CJ’s Six Dollar Burger.

Incidentally, hey Carl’s Junior: I have a big, fat, enormous bone to pick with you that’s probably going to be the subject of an upcoming rant. I’ve been thinking of writing it for over 3 years now. But you can start with firing all your marketing people, the ones that tell you what your “image” should be and also produce those loathesome commercials. No I’m not Adam Carolla, I agree that guy is a dill-doh. But the bone I have to pick with you stretches magnificently over the course of 25 years. I’m thinking of writing a book about it. I will call it: The Illustrated History of How Carl’s Junior Broke My Heart. More on it later.

Now where was I? Oh yes, the wonderful Mediterranean style Bertolli frozen meals. OK, I know these are expensive. Even though it says “2 Servings of Vegetables & Grilled Steak” on the bag, I was easily able to scarf the whole thing myself. At between $6-8 dollars a pop, that ain’t Cheap Eats. But man, I was getting so tired of reviewing dollar store food. This was a nice change. I felt like I was at the Hamptons picking eggs with Martha Stewart. So upper crust…

So, this is a skillet preparation meal – you dump the whole thing frozen into a skillet, cover it, and cook for 10 minutes. Pretty easy – the only thing is I don’t have a skillet cover. So whenever I need to make one of these things, I need to get my second skillet and balance it precariously on top. It’s fun. Wait, no it’s not. But it works.

The ingredients in this thing are pretty damn amazing. I mean, I don’t even buy cherry tomatoes normally. It had WHOLE cherry tomatoes and they didn’t skimp. There were large chunks of yellow bell pepper – not the dehydrated flakes you usually see. There were sliced mushrooms that were actually creminis instead of portobellos – but since the former are baby versions of portobellos, I guess they’re not really lying. There was spinach in it. There was large strips of steak. And there was rigatoni in it that didn’t taste like Campbell’s soup noodles. (Yeah, I know – I actually like the jello noodles in Campbell’s soup too.)

I think what impressed me was that the sauce and the overall pasta wasn’t extremely salty like most frozen meals I eat. I mean, I always figured that the cheaper meals jacked up the salt content so that you wouldn’t taste how much the food sucked. But I’ve eaten a lot of high-end meals that tasted like a deer-lick. This had an excellent taste, the noodles were perfect al dente, the salt content seemed about right, and the ingredients were generous. The tang of the tomatoes balanced nicely with the steak strips.

A few things I noticed: the steak in the picture on the bag had grill marks, but the actual steak strips I got didn’t have any. The steak also had a little bit of that “processed” taste – but hey, it wasn’t like salisbury steak or anything. It was real meat. The sauce was a little heavy on the garlic side. But I think I’m really just trying to find something to nitpick on now.

In a perfect world – all frozen meals would taste like this… and they would all cost the same as a Banquet Meal. It’s really an apples to oranges (or a Carl’s Junior to In-N-Out) type of comparison. This isn’t a perfect world, and this is Cheap Eats. But I’m human – so sue me if I liked this high end meal even though two of them cost as much as it does to fill up the gas tank of our Prius. I had to take the score down a notch because it costs so much, but if you happen to win the lottery and you can’t cook, you should fill up your freezer with some of these.

[Editor's Note: I saved the empty Bertolli bag so that every now and again I could huff in some of that wonderful garlicky mediterranean meal smell to remind myself of what a great break that was from reviewing cans of Beanee Weenee. Also, I don't want people to think I dislike CJs because of an isolated incident. They WERE our favorite burger place. This was a decades-long crescendo of gradual disappointment involving our family giving so many CJs franchises across so many states so many chances. I'm no mealy mouthed, one-time customer troll looking to flame a CJ rep. This is something that keeps me up at nights when I should be sleeping. I have insomnia thinking of all the good times in high school hanging with the Happy Star. Sorry, I have a tear in my eye. *Sniff*]

Price: $6-8 for 24 oz.
Found At: Albertsons
Cheap Eats Score: 7/10

Hye there. I’m going to be doing something sort of lame starting today. Since we’re already splitting food review coverage between Cheap Eats and Cheaplander, I’ll be cross-promoting it between the sites. So, if there’s a review over there, I’ll mostly likely post a link up over here.

I know, I know. This is nothing more than a scheme to make it seem like I’m writing more content here at Cheap Eats than I actually am. I’d be stupid not to do it, however, since Cheaplander is just getting off the ground while Cheap Eats has much more traffic and has been around for nearly 5 years.

For those who haven’t visited yet, Cheaplander is “supposed to be” just like this blog, except it deals with any topic – not only food. The main focus of the site has to do with “living within your means” – I guess that’s as good a topic as any in this economy. We’re also running it as a pseudo-group blog, so if you’re interested in contributing reviews, let me know. I might put up a “help wanted” shingle here in a bit. I’m also planning on running “contests” over there eventually.

(A note for all the companies sending in food for review: you have an equal chance of having your product appear on the Cheap Eats site and the Cheaplander site. It’s pretty much random right now.)

Deep in a lead-shielded, missile-proof bunker 1000 feet underground in Scuttlefishville, AZ:

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you here today. We’re ramping up to Defcon 3.14159 in just a few minutes. Outgoing ICBM missile launches have been detected all over the world. We’re in for multiple strikes in all the major cities. Boom. It’s not going to be pretty. We’ll be down here safeguarding the nation’s secrets for at least the next 10 years or so.”

“Lieutenant Vonnegut, give me a status report on our basic neccesities.”

“Sir, all the necessary supplies and rations are in place for the coming siege. We should be able to survive down here for over 20 years. For consumibles, we have 1,580,000 cans of Spam, 1,650,000 cans of Corn Niblets, 130,000 boxes of Twinkies, 730,000 cans Vienna Sausages, 950,000 cans of Chef Boyardi, 740,000 cans of Progresso Soup, 55,000 packs of Lime Jello, 4,230,000 bottles of Gatorade, 1,200,000 cans of Refried Beans and 653 cans of Beanee Weenee.

“Very good, Lieutenant. Hand me one of those cans of Beanee Weenee. And a spoon. Let’s start this war off right.”

And so it goes… and so on.

OK, I originally was going to write a whole fricking post-apocolyptic Vonnegut-ish play in 3 acts for this review which would star the aforementioned Beanee Weenee falling into enemy hands and causing a collapse of the economy which was based in Beanee Weenee Bucks. It would end with a time travelling anthropomorphic Steller Sea Lion who would arrive with a cache of the beans to save the day.

But lucky for you, I’ve got writer’s block this afternoon.

Truthfully, Beanee Weenee has always been a sort of mythological canned food for me. I just knew the name and hadn’t even looked for it in the supermarket. I had a feeling it was one of those “legendary” rural foods that no one talks about but everyone has in their cupboard. Like those Bryan Tamales. I’m just way to lazy to research it more – so please tell me if indeed it is some sort of famous delicacy that’s been around for years and years.

Anyhow, I came across some cans at the Dollar Store, and I just couldn’t pass it up. The first thing I need to say about Beanee Weenee is that they have spelled it wrong. Oh yes, I do know a potatoe from a potato. Or, I often fool myself into thinking that I do. I keep wanting to write Beanie Weanie or Beanie Wienie.

The second thing I need to say is that this is one of those “eat cold or hot” deals. I’m not sure why you would eat it cold, unless you were stuck 1000 feet underground in a lead shielded bunker like the protagonist in my aborted narrative above. But hey, wouldn’t they have a microwave or stove down there?

There was no way I was going to scarf this can of pork and beans cold. I popped the top (bonus “emergency food” points for not requiring a can opener) and poured the pitiful repast into a little pot with a lid. It warmed up quickly. I then poured it into a bowl and consumed it in 5 minutes. Man, the things I do for Cheap Eats.

Continue reading “Beanee Weenee” …