in which TV dinners are like cadavers

I had to go to work at 5:30 pm today, and since I could only haphazard that I'd probably get home somewhere between 7:30 and 11:30, my mother told me she had gotten me some dinner for whenever I got home, which was totally sweet and thoughtful. And she knows that I'm trying to avoid eating the really grody chemical soup like foodish things, so she got me some chicken teriyaki frozen dinner than appeared to be made of food ingredients and not a misplaced high school chemistry lab report like most TV dinners.

Which, as I said, really thoughtful! However, during my years as a TV dinner connoisseur (I like to pretend that I'm past that stage and not just in a temporary interlude of generally having access to one Actual Meal a day) I learned a couple things to which I have yet to find much exception. One is that Asian food, regardless of how awesome it may be in general, is almost never remotely palatable in TV-dinner form. It's all oily, but like BP-oily (too soon?) and not like delicious olive oil oily, and soggy and squeaky like Chinese takeout chicken seems to me. Basically at best it's all like that really terrible Chinese delivery food that's so fucking awful it's awesome, except without the part about it being awesome.

The other thing I learned, which should be palm/forehead common sense, is that it is absolutely not possible to marry the twin dreams of healthy and tasty when you're packaging up a pre-prepared meal to freeze and stick in the frozen-food aisle of Wal-Mart awaiting the tender ministrations of a microwave to bring out its fresh and delicious goodness. You can't do things like that to fresh ingredients and expect it to come out tasting anything like it would with all those chemicals to do whatever it is they do. It'd be like putting a fresh and formerly healthy young corpse in a coffin without embalming it and expecting it to be rosy-cheeked and non-squishy a week later. Except I think the freezer bit throws the analogy off, and I don't know anything about embalming or the decomposition process and I'm goddamn well not researching it. Point being: it's gross.

A lot of people -- or at least some people, or at least maybe one or two people -- swear by the Kashi brand, but I still have found that it tastes like ass. Like chemical-oozing ass, even, despite the nonthreatening ingredient list. Whereas, you know, Stouffer's lasagna, with its ingredient list that takes up half the box and most of it ending in -ides and -enes and -ynes and shit, is fucking delicious. Especially when you burn it a little and you get the burnt lasagna crust on the sides, which is the best part.

So I threw my decidedly non-lasagna-crust-edged chicken teriyaki away and ate bread & butter for dinner. And died a little inside.