Critique: Best Choice Double Stuffed Beef Ravioli

You’d think with such a long name that there might be some redeeming quality with this canned item. Well, you’d be wrong. I originally bought this product because the price was so attractive when compared to a similar can of Chef Boyardee Jumbo Beef Ravioli located a few shelves down. Here is what I discovered.

First of all, nothing can be done to disguise the amount of salt in this can of crapola. A 425 gram serving hits you with 2,200 milligrams of sodium (a whole days allowance). That’s almost enough to leave a salt ring around your mouth. In many cases, salt helps to camouflage bad tasting food in an effort to make it more palatable. In this case, all you actually taste is the salt. Oh, and after going to the trouble, eating a can of this stuff racks up over 500 calories! The Chef Boyardee version, while not much better in the nutrition department, does taste a whole lot better.

The bottom line: If you’re under the age of fifteen, you can eat this stuff on occasion and survive the process. Anyone older than that should maybe take a pass.

Critique: Banquet Classic Fried Chicken Meal

Being the gluten for punishment that I am, after critiquing Banquet’s Homestyle Pot Roast which received less than stellar grades, I deiced the go ahead and give their Fried Chicken Meal a go also. As you can see, the picture looks very inviting. The meal is on the small side; only 228 grams in total. The three compartments held a round bread ball that is supposed to be the chicken thigh while the other two sported a helping of mashed potatoes and corn.

First, I would like to address the nutritional values before delving into the actual taste. OK. Hmm. Let’s see what we have here… the calories come in at 440 with half those coming from fat. Not to be out done, the cholesterol is an impressive 80 milligrams or one third of the average adults daily allowance… but wait! The real winner has got to be the sodium content! Over 1,110 milligrams or close to half an adult’s daily allowance. So, let’s review shall we? Seems we have a meal here of somewhat questionable nutritional value. For a few bucks, your body gets assaulted with a boatload of fat, cholesterol and salt! What a deal.

OK. Let’s move on to the big tamale shall we? The taste test is where it’s at, as they say. I microwaved the meal for the proscribed amount of time and was soon greeted with the smell of chicken, corn and potatoes all mixed up together. The end result is about what you’d expect from Banquet, not great, but also not all that bad considering the poor nutritional score. My grade for this meal is a C+ for taste and a D- for nutrition or a 5 on a scale of 10. (A slightly better grade than the one I gave the Pot Roast meal in a previous critique).

Mubarak, your fifteen minutes are up!

If you had asked the average Joe on the street who the leader of Egypt was, I’m sure a lot of blank stars would ensue. Now, in just the span of nineteen days, it seems everyone knows everything about Hosni Mubarak. A name that will now just as quickly be forgotten after he was unceremoniously ousted from office on Friday. So, that’s it then. What used to be fifteen minutes of fame seem now to have inflated out to almost a month. In Mubarak’s case, that was exactly eighteen days, twenty three hours and forty five minutes too long.

Critique: Banquet Home Style Pot Roast

This offering from Banquet serves up a frozen entrée consisting of two compartments; one with green beans and one with a mix of carrots, potatoes and pot roast chunks in a brown gravy. While they got the gravy and pot roast correct, the rest of this meal left me gagging.

The problem seems to be with their idea of doneness. It seems to be different from mine. My concept of a good pot roast requires all the vegetables to be about the same amount of doneness. Not too hard and not too mushy. Not so with this CF. In the package I ate, the carrots and green beans were almost crunchy (raw?) while the potatoes were decidedly over-cooked. Not a great taste sensation as far as my primitive little mouth was concerned.

I give this meal a solid D- on flavor and a D on nutrition (a palm-sized  272 gram meal with almost 900 mg of sodium) or a score of 4 on a scale of 10. In general, a total waste of my time and money. ConAgra, you can do better than this.

More snow for Forsyth!

I think February 2011 is already turning out to be a snowy one. After receiving a couple of inches of a combination of ice and snow on the first, not a one inch forecast snow turned into a good five incher overnight. I think the weather service referred to this as a ‘deformation event’. Whatever that means.

Once again, I'll bet the snow plows have be at it all night getting the main and secondary roads cleared off so  people can get to where they need to go. Good thing this happened on a Friday night. Most folks don’t have to try getting into work as a result.

Hopefully this little forecast Icon I saw on my home screen this morning is in error!

Hotmail Email Update Request is a Scam!

Beware of any email that looks like this. It is a scam and the crooks behind it are trying to rip you off! Any email you get that asks for information is normally not in your best interests.

Lady Gaga in Paris with her song Telephone

Pure Lady Gaga live in Paris and doing her thing. Good work on choreographing and other effects! My edits were poor as befitted an old mans vision. The circle thing with the fingers... yes, done that! It's the energy of all the cells working together, in each of us, that matter. Just as we each emerged pure and naked from our mother's birth canal, so then do we now blaze forth. Each capturing our special and unique moments of divine existence... At some point in World Time, the Creator glanced down, and was proud.... For we are!