Maribou went out of town, right? Well, smack dab in the middle of that, I found myself in the Safeway buying some pepper bacon to bake up and walking past the freezer case, I saw these:
The first thing I saw was, of course, “five bucks”. I immediately thought back to the early oughts and that “five dollar footlong” jingle that got stuck in everybody’s head forever and even today is distorting fast food prices.
The second thing I thought was “I don’t really wanna cook. But these don’t seem like a lot of effort.”
I looked at the back and was sort of surprised to see that you baked them for somewhere between 35 and 40 minutes and you did *NOT* microwave them because they were raw chicken that had been flash-frozen and not cooked chicken breasts.
I shrugged and picked up a couple of boxes of the broccoli cheese ones and figured that I’d bake them up, two for dinner, two for lunch tomorrow. I figured that they’d be about a C in quality, I could hope for a C+ and fear a C- and what more could you ask for when it came to a five dollar meal?
Well, I got them home and fixed them up and, wouldn’t you know it? That first bite had me wild-eyed in disbelief. They were *AMAZING*. Seriously, an A-. The second bite. Whammo. Delicious. The cheese and broccoli and chicken all melded together in a perfect bite and I couldn’t believe how good it was. I could serve this to someone else. I could serve this to my *BOSS*.
It wasn’t a depressing bachelor meal like I thought it would be but something that, if you threw it with some Rice-a-Roni or something, would be something you’d think you had delivered from a restaurant.
When Maribou got home, I fixed her some and she was skeptical until she took her first bite. “Holy cow”, she said (paraphrased). We have since purchased and baked and tried all four of the kinds you see above and THEY ARE ALL AMAZING. Like, I made two at random tonight for dinner and Maribou asked which ones and I told her and she said “well, it’s not like I’d have been disappointed”.
If you see these in your grocery store: PICK THEM UP. They are seriously amazing.
You know how I had to go to Costco last week to pick up aluminum foil? I needed it to be able to make more of these puppies.
The only complaint that I have about them is that they are too uniform and too identical to each other which means that you can’t pretend that you made them yourself.
This weekend will be spent making stuff in the crock pot, visiting with friends, and prepping for another crazy week next week. Things will calm down soon, I tell myself.
So… what’s on your docket?
I need to go try to find a retirement gift for my outgoing department chair. She is a very private person and even though I’ve worked with her for 25 years, I don’t feel like I know her as I knew the person who previously retired. I’ve been told she likes bowling, golf, and her dogs…..so maybe I try to find something she can play with the dogs with, like maybe one of those ball-throwers?
I also need to think about a birthday present for my mom in another couple weeksReport
If you know what kind of dogs she has, maybe a driver cover with that type of dog on it?
If your budget is only $20 or so, golf balls.Report
I’ve spent time during the last few months going back and cleaning up previous projects before starting a major new one. The last one on the list was reworking the audio/video chat toy I previously built for the granddaughters [1]. (The only person they can call is me.) The new version is physically smaller and simpler and the software has been cleaned up considerably.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/grandpavision.jpg
The new major project is being the family archivist, digitizing and organizing the huge piles of paper that have accumulated [2]. I haven’t seen any document digitizing system that is both inexpensive and meets my list of desired features. So I’ll be playing around with cheap hardware, chaining together some open-source software, and coding up some algorithm experiments of my own. Plus starting on the actual work, of course.
[1] 30+ years ago now I was doing research on multi-party multi-media communication over internet protocols. During COVID the granddaughters’ school held Grandparents Day using Zoom. It was horrible! I dug out my old software and got it running on a Raspberry Pi. Back in the day it was all a ‘486 desktop PC could do to run this; the Pi just loafs along :^)
[2] For example, my uncle spent part-time during 20 years of retirement collecting stuff about that branch of the family and the tiny Iowa town where he and his siblings were born. When he died my aunt shipped all of his source material to my sister. One day my sister showed up with eight big plastic tubs containing all that stuff. Those are sitting in my basement now, without any sort of organization.
http://mcain6925.com/ordinary/boxes.small.jpgReport
Feed it to the AI. Humans may not reach other planets but Earthlings will. Make sure that they’re populated with your stuff too.Report
When I was in grad school, lo, these many years ago, those Tyson’s chicken cordon bleu were very cheap in bulk at Sam’s Club, so I always had a box in the freezer. Those were a real life saver in lean times, supplementing my diet of ramen, mac ‘n’ cheese, and whatever free food they had at some faculty event. I think Sam’s had the broccoli and cheese one too (and I may have tried it), but the other two I don’t think I’ve seen before.Report
Long ago in graduate school my housemate’s and my emergency food, for when the money ran out a couple days before the end-of-the-month and our next paychecks, was a bag of onions, a big block of rat cheese in the bottom of the fridge, a couple of cans of really cheap local brand enchilada sauce, and the little old Mexican lady at one of the busy street corners making ten-for-a-quarter fresh corn tortillas. Austin Texas, 1977. Cheese and onion enchiladas get a little tired when it’s the third day in a row.
He was the housemate who taught me to heat flour tortillas barehanded on a gas stove burner. We went on vacation for three weeks after our second year, doing day trips out from his Mom’s house in San Jose. She caught me one night when I was hungry flipping tortillas barehanded on the gas stove. “You have,” she said, “Entirely the wrong color skin to be doing that so well.”
Yes, if you don’t eat the free food at a faculty event, they take away your graduate student card. Even worse if you don’t drink the free alcohol :^)Report
I do the tortilla by hand things to this day, though I don’t know that I’m great at it. I do this mostly because I’m too lazy to go through all the work of heating tortillas properly when it’s just me eating.Report
The brie and apple one is positively divine. I don’t want to say that it’s my favorite, lest I indicate that I’d be disappointed with one of the others.
But if you haven’t tried it, it’s very much worth looking for while you’re in the freezer aisle.Report