Whoever first thought of freezing foods should be up there with DaVinci, Franklin and Edison when it comes to inventors. What a great idea, you take good food, freeze it and re-heat it at a later time. You get to enjoy a meal that someone else cooked in no time without the mess. Like most good inventions, freezing food was probably a mistake. Some Eskimo probably just got done clubbin’ a seal and dragged that shit through the snow. A piece of that meat probably fell off and was frozen in the ground until Boolaf Palin (one of the first known Eskimos) found it like a week later. Of course being a Palin, he simply threw it out and went to the market to trade 150,000 sperm whale bones for some new coats. But the next Eskimo stumbled upon it, heated it up, and ate it. Thus freezing food technology was born.
Thousands of years later, the cooking-ly challenged or people without time couldn’t live without it. You might as well remove the word frozen because to these devout people it’s just food, it’s all they eat. In fact, for these people, they preface the word food as we know it, with the word “fresh.” Like, hey I’m not having my normal Hungry Man Dinner; I’m having this “fresh” chicken. Whether you eat frozen food all the time or just some of the time, we all know that each type of frozen food have their pros and cons, and some stay more true to form then others. However, one thing stands true: When it comes to frozen microwave-prepared food, you’re simply minutes away from a meal that, well, at the very least is hot on the outside and cold in the middle, unless it’s a hot pocket. More on that later.
Frozen Dinners
Frozen dinners are the worst of all frozen foods, besides hot pockets. They are a good idea in principal. Give people a "meal" in a nice plastic tray with separators for the representative food groups. You get your meat, your veggie, and a starch. Despite the good intentions, there are two major problems with frozen dinners. First off, they're tiny. Have you, or anyone you know, ever eaten a frozen dinner and said man I'm full, stuffed, satisfied? No. Because it’s never happened. No one can fill up on the half piece of chicken, 10 kernels of corn and teaspoon of mashed potatoes. Most frozen foods these days are Healthy Choice or weight watchers and are made that way to help you intake less calories. The problem is that you need to eat three of them just to reach the stage of “not starving.” Secondly, they always smell wayyyyyyyy better than they taste. At work for example, you can smell people heating up these frozen dinners and it’s like Emeril decided to join your company for a day and cook everyone lunch. Then you go check it out and see the person walking away with a piece of chicken with some sauce bubbling off of it screaming because that little plastic tray is always scolding hot.
On a side note: how un-key was it when the corn spilt over and got embedded in your brownie of your Kid Kusine?Side note on Kid Kuisines: We know these meals are cool and geared toward kids because cuisine is spelled with a K. Doing that automatically means something is hip for some reason. Same with prefacing a word with “Xtreme.” The other hip thing to do is to put up a picture of a dinosaur or something. And if the dinosaur is skateboarding forget about it. Every 9-year old is dropping that in the cart.
Frozen Pizza
Frozen pizza, in our humble opinion, is the king of frozen foods. It holds truest to form. It's not delivery, It's Digiorno, and it’s better than most delivery, and much more cost effective. Think
about it. If you order a pizza, it’s at your house in 20-30 min and it costs about 15 dollars by the time you leave the tip. If you grab a Digiorno, it costs 5 bucks at the supermarket and you can have that bad boy heated and ready to eat in 15-20 min.Side note: Is there any sense in pre-heating the oven? No. If you put it in while its pre heating the pizza starts cooking while the oven heats up, your killing 2 birds with one stone and it gets the pizza cooked faster. Pre-heating an oven is an old wives tale. In the words of George Carlin, what the fuck is pre-heating? There’s only two possible states an oven can be in: Heated and non-heated. Pre-heating is a utterly useless fucking term.
Anyway, you could have three Digiorno's for the price of one delivered pizza, without sacrificing much in the way of taste, AND if you don't finish your frozen pizza, you can treat it like regular pizza and throw that bad boy in the fridge to heat it up tomorrow. You can get two meals out of one frozen pizza. Though, it’s best not to think of it as re-heating a re-heated pizza. That just doesn’t sound appealing.
Frozen French Fries
Frozen French fries are at best, OK as a frozen food product. You can heat them with any
technique you want but they still don't have that great fried taste to them. No matter what you do they taste bland and uninspired, that is until you douse them in BBQ sauce, or use the less exciting, Ketchup. The good thing about BBQ sauce or Ketchup is that no matter how bad something may taste, if you throw either condiment on that business, it’s going to taste like BBQ or Ketchup. Brilliant.Frozen Breakfast Foods
Frozen waffles, pancakes, French toast sticks, they're all good, but they're only good if you do them up right. Frozen waffles have to be cooked in the toaster, obviously.
- A frozen waffle is great and like a frozen pizza it’s much more time effective the
n making "real waffles". I bet 10 out of 10 Americans have had 50 times the amount of frozen waffles as regular waffles in their lives. Who has time to make those up? If you’re going to go through all the trouble of mixing the ingredients and putting it on the waffle iron you might as well make pancakes. Homemade pancakes are great. Then again, the brilliance of the waffle is that it’s a pancake, except for the fact that there’s dozens of little compartments for your syrup, a very key feature. - Speaking of pancakes, frozen pancakes are solid. They're probably the least popular of the frozen breakfast foods, but pop a few of those flapjacks in the microwave and douse them in syrup and you’re in for a treat.
- Frozen French toast sticks are hit or miss, if you microwave them they're awful, if you cook them in the oven they're amazing. It's all about the crispy factor, no one wants to eat warm soggy bread, which is essentially what they become when you microwave them, but throw them in the oven and get them nice and crispy and you are living large. Really though, if you’re going to cook them in an oven, you might as well do them up right and make your own. How hard is it to mix eggs, cinnamon, milk and sugar, dip bread and cook it for 5 minutes? Therefore frozen French Toast is decidedly the most useless frozen breakfast.
- Furthermore on the topic of frozen breakfast treats, Pillsbury was brilliant with the addition of two items to the market. The first were the cinnamon buns in a can and the
second was Toaster Strudel. Both have plenty of things in common. One, they’re tasty delicious. Two, they never come with enough frosting. Despite that inherent flaw, toaster strudel owns the Pop Tart in the pre-made pastry department, and the c-buns are way better than anything you’d get from Entiments’s. When it comes to strudel, apple-cinnamon reigns supreme. Occasionally Raspberry or strawberry are good too. But now they’re getting fancy, with Egg/Cheese strudel and Boston creme strudel. Hey, Pillsbury, stick to what you do best. We don’t need you flooding the marketplace with these less than stellar varieties.Frozen Hybrid foods (eg bagel bites)
We all know the slogan, “When pizza’s on a bagel, you can eat pizza anytime.” Pizza bites or bagel bites or pizza bagels, whatever you want to call it, it doesn't matter. When you combine pizza and bagels or English Muffins, you’re in for some crazy deliciousness. According to their ad 
department simply putting anything on a bagel means you can have it for breakfast too. It’s somewhat true, but what is undeniably true is that they're best Post-midnight. It’s Saturday night, and you could have been out all night, or done nothing at all. But once that hour strikes 12, you’re getting hit hard with a hunger attack. This is truly the best time for bagel bites. Pop those circular discs of yum-factor 10's in the oven for the recommended time and watch them work as they go Rambo on your hunger. Now, they say you COULD do these things in the microwave, but as we covered earlier with pizza, you really cannot do them in the M-Wave. What you’re getting for your laziness is punished with flimsy, rubbery, lukewarm in the middle and burning hot on the outside, bagel pizza. That’s no good.
Hot Pockets
This is the most overrated product you can possibly find in the frozen meals aisle. It tastes bad. It smells bad. And if you were John at age 12, they made you barf for an entire night, ruining them forever. Unless you’re using them as hand warmers, there’s no sense in EVER having one. Awful.
Frozen Meatballs
The pound-for-pound king of frozen foods. This is the one food that is decent in the microwave, but if you cook them in sauce on a stove top or in the oven? They’re miraculous. And there’s plenty of diversity here. You can put them with pasta, or make a mean meatball sandwich with them, or just eat them without anything, they’re that good.
Frozen pastas and ravioli
Short on time? Tired of boxed pasta or mac and cheese? This is the answer. What’s awesome about frozen ravioli is that it tastes so good, and only takes like 6 minutes after you get that water boiling. They’re way better than say, chef Boyardee, and most likely, way better than anything else you were going to make that night. Along with Ravioli, frozen lasagna is also delicious. Sure it’s not homemade, but nothing ever is when it’s a frozen meal. But you’ll definitely be satisfied with the warm goodness of lasagna.
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