Kroger has "Free Friday Downloads" which are online coupons that can be downloaded to get one specific free item. The free items cover the range of groceries available at Kroger, being anything from candy bars on up. I used to think these were designed to get shoppers to hunt for them, thereby forcing shoppers to walk through and look in more aisles of the store, but the Free Friday items are now always located near the front of the store, so the intent must be to drive web traffic towards Kroger.
One of my Rules for Life is: Just because something is free, doesn't mean you want it. Following this, some Free Friday items (gum), I don't bother with, while others are a risk free way to try something I wouldn't otherwise buy.
A few weeks ago, Stouffer's FitKitchen was the free item. It promised, "Hearty Satisfying Meals." Sadly, it wasn't, but at least the cost to me was about commensurate with the product.
The beans were rubbery. The chicken was even more rubbery, and the sauce can best be described as odd. The sweat potatoes were tolerably good. Here is the part where I'm being hypocritical. Some of my other weekday meals could be considered on par with Stouffer's FitKitchen. I actually like frozen chicken wings. Frozen pizza (with toppings added) are nearly a staple. But the FitKitchen, frankly, reminded me of the 1970's TV dinners we occasionally ate as a child.
I would hope that either my memory of TV dinners is clouded and that 1970's culinary adventure was actually worse than I remember it, or by 2016 ready to eat meals could have advanced. I suppose the one thing that the 1970's TV dinners had going from them was the lack of microwave ovens. Coming in a plastic tray, Stouffer's FitKitchen has only the microwave as a cooking option. Thinking back, I can't imagine how bad the 1970's TV dinners would have been if microwaves had been nearly universally available then. To this day, I think I dislike peas just due to the memory of TV dinners.
There must exist a world, somewhere, between Chris Kimball's fantasy land and the TV dinner where most of us live. Yes, some of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country foods are touted as simple. But having both time and energy to go the Kimball route on a daily basis is a delusion. Staying in the PBS world, I once saw Caprial admit going to McDon... on occasion with the kids - this was refreshing, but that show has become unwatchable now that they have some truly bizarre onscreen husband-and-wife dynamics.
America's Test Kitchen plays its watchers disingenuously. When not wearing a costume, Chris Kimball likes to start the show with the absolute worst example of a dish, and then improve on it - thus setting the bar impossibly low for success. He also claims to have a "very small kitchen," and yet Cook's Country is reportedly filmed at his farm in Vermont. By that standard, my kitchen is a thimble.
Walking through Kroger yesterday, I paused by the frozen dinner section. "TV Dinners" designed for oven cooking still exist. Many of these are now in paper or plastic trays which is a little frightening, but I guess it works OK. So maybe the unhappiness with the Stouffer's FitKitchen should be against the cooking method, not the cuisine? Either way, the frozen meals were left in the freezer - available for the next shopper who wants to eat over 1 pound of food.
I actually think much of the food I grew up on would be pretty unpalatable by today's standards, or by my standards today. But TV dinners, something special when I was young, don't seem to have improved much since then. Perhaps the real issue lies in the fact I've been eating them wrong all along. After all, TV dinners were created to be eaten off of steel TV trays, sitting on the sofa, while in front of the TV, with shag carpeting underfoot. Shudder.
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