Month: September 2010

REVIEW: Jimmy Dean Jimmy D’s French Toast Griddlers

Marvo 12 Comments

Jimmy Dean describes their Jimmy D’s breakfast entrees, which consist of french toast sticks with sausage, something that looks like a corn dog and these French Toast Griddlers, as “Satisfying, hearty breakfast to help kids do their best.”

Really?

I thought threats of taking away their Xbox 360; punishment in the form of them having to put on a clown costume and entertain the rest of the family; and using toys, candy and cold hard cash as bribes were the only ways to help kids do their best.

If all it takes is a microwaveable breakfast sandwich made from cinnamon glazed french toast and a Jimmy Dean turkey sausage patty to help children achieve their goals, then I’ve got parenting down pat. Bring on the women who wish to bear my children and I shall provide them with an ample supply of Jimmy D’s products and a standalone freezer.

If I fed my future illegitimate children these Jimmy D’s French Toast Griddlers and they helped my children do their best, I can imagine how successful they’ll become. With my genes, I’m sure they’ll accomplish amazing things, like become Walmart greeters, carnival game attendants, unemployed writers or repressive dictators of uninhabited islands.

Like the use of comic book fonts on the packaging, it appears Jimmy Dean used turkey sausage, instead of pork sausage, in their French Toast Griddlers for the children, who probably don’t need to consume twice the fat and saturated fat the pork sausages would’ve provided. But even if the sausages were made out of pork, the children probably wouldn’t notice as they stuff it down their gullets as they get ready for school to be the best that they can be.

Most children would probably enjoy the sweet and salty combination of the cinnamon flavored French toast with the turkey sausage. It’s like a poor child’s McDonald’s McGriddle. It’s also a healthier child’s McDonald’s McGriddle, since it has three times less fat, saturated fat, sodium and sugar than a Sausage McGriddle.

However, I’m not a child, I’m just a man who watches Ni Hao, Kai-Lan on Nick Jr. to help me start conversations with the workers at the Chinese restaurants and shady places I frequent, and I think the French Toast Griddlers are bland. The turkey sausage doesn’t have the same quality flavor and spice as Jimmy Dean’s pork sausage and the cinnamon glaze on the French toast isn’t pronounced.

The sausage patty is slightly smaller than the French toast buns and both are easy to bite through after being microwaved for 85 seconds. There’s also an egginess to the French toast, which makes me wish there was also a layer of scrambled eggs in this sandwich.

If Jimmy Dean wanted to make their French Toast Griddlers better, they could use Jimmy Dean’s flavorful pork sausage and, perhaps, sweeten the French toast with syrup, but, of course, adding all of that would create a satisfying, hearty breakfast to help kids do their best…to get fat.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 sandwich/102 g – 210 calories, 70 calories from fat, 8 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat*, 60 milligrams of cholesterol, 390 milligrams of sodium, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 6 grams of sugar, 8 grams of protein, 2% vitamin A, 2% calcium and 10% iron.)

*contains interesterified soybean oil and hydrogenated soybean oil

Item: Jimmy Dean Jimmy D’s French Toast Griddlers
Price: $7.49
Size: 4 pack
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: Individually wrapped. Ready in 85 seconds. Uses healthier turkey sausage. Eight grams of protein. Helps kids do their best. Learning Chinese via Ni Hao, Kai-Lan.
Cons: Bland. Turkey sausage is less flavorful than Jimmy Dean’s pork sausage. Cinnamon flavor is too light. My future illegitimate children becoming Walmart greeters, carnival game attendants, unemployed writers or repressive dictators of uninhabited islands.

APOLOGY: Because I Didn’t Know Moving 10 Years of Crap Would Take So Much Time

Marvo 13 Comments

I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts this week. I’m currently moving to a new place and I didn’t realize how difficult and time consuming it is to move the 10 years worth of crap I’ve accumulated, which includes 35 USB cables, 100 pounds of books I haven’t read, two printers, a dead PowerMac G4 with 17 inch monitor (which I swear I’ll revive one day), kanji practice worksheets from college, half a dozen hard drives that are less than 250 GB (which sounds like I have a lot of porn, but surprisingly they don’t contain any, because my porn is stored on a 2 TB drive), several pairs of jeans that don’t fit anymore, a lot of magazines with Tiger Woods on the cover and a comfort wipe.

I’ve moved over 95 percent of my stuff and will bring the last 5 percent to the new place by tomorrow, so expect a bukkake of reviews next week.

REVIEW: Kraft Big Ass Easy Mac Cups

Marvo 11 Comments

Kraft Easy Mac Large

Okay, so this bigger Kraft Easy Mac Cup isn’t called Big Ass Easy Mac Cup, but it should be since it’s exactly twice the weight of the original size and comparing their sizes would be like comparing Kardashian sister asses.

I reviewed the original size when it was first introduced, and while I liked it very much, one complaint I had about it was that I didn’t think it was very filling and wouldn’t be suitable for a meal. Well, either a lot of people felt the same way or the folks at Kraft read that review and — four years later — the power of this quasi-product review blog compelled them to up the size of their Easy Mac Cups.

Making a Big Ass Easy Mac Cup is extremely easy. On a food preparing scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the computer on the Jetsons that makes anything you tell it to and 1 being the entire process to make homemade bacon that includes everything from hunting the pig in a forest to curing the meat to frying it in a pan, the Big Ass Easy Mac Cup is a 7, which is like making a Cup Noodles.

All one has to do to prepare the Big Ass Easy Mac Cup is fill the container with water up to the fill line, microwave it for three and a half minutes, stir in the cheese sauce mix that eventually turns into a cheese sauce that makes Taco Bell’s cheese sauce look significantly edible, and then enjoy…or ponder the direction your life has taken that has forced you to eat a Big Ass Easy Mac Cup.

Kraft Easy Mac Large 3

The Big Ass Easy Mac Cup has the same level of cheesiness as the original Easy Mac Cup, which I surprisingly enjoyed when I reviewed it. However, while I think the smaller Easy Mac Cup isn’t very filling, its chubbier sibling might be too filling.

About three-fourths of the way through the Big Ass Easy Mac Cup, my mouth felt like I’d just given a 30 minute blowjob to a can on Kraft Easy Cheese. I got sick of its cheesiness and had a hard time finishing it off.

I guess the Big Ass Easy Mac Cup was too big for me.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 package – 440 calories, 70 calories from fat, 8 grams of fat, 5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 1050 milligrams of sodium, 78 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, 11 grams of sugar, 13 grams of protein, 15% calcium and 15% iron.)

Item: Kraft Big Ass Easy Mac Cups
Price: $1.99
Size: 4.1 ounces
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Enjoyable cheesiness. Twice the size of regular Easy Mac Cups. Easy to make. The computer on the Jetsons that made their food.
Cons: Too much Easy Mac for me. Sucking on a Kraft Easy Cheese can. Cheese sauce mix makes Taco Bell’s cheese sauce look good. Great source of sodium. The influential power TIB doesn’t have.

REVIEW: Hot Pockets SideShots Sloppy Joes

Kelley 13 Comments

Marvo covered Hot Pockets SideShots Mini Cheeseburgers back in January, and now I’m here to tell you about the other SideShots: Sloppy Joes.

If you’re anything like me, and most people in this country probably are, the majority of your sloppy joe experiences have come from a pound of ground beef, a can of Manwich, and some cheap generic hamburger buns. In other words, you were a poor college student or a stoner. Or both.

I haven’t had sloppy joes in at least a few years, but I remember them being messy and guiltily tasty. As your bun falls apart two seconds after you ladle on the Manwich mixture and your face and hands get covered in tangy tomato sauce, you get the feeling that you are a little too old for eating something this cheap and messy. Messy ribs at a great barbecue joint? Acceptable. Messy $1 can of tomato mix? Unacceptable. Growing up sucks.

According to the official SideShots website, “Thanks to the mini soft-baked bun, Sloppy Joes no longer requires [sic] a fork for spillage.” Bad grammar aside, perhaps Hot Pockets has come up with a solution for us adults to enjoy sloppy joes without the sloppy. Microwaving two SideShots only takes a minute and 45 seconds, perfect for a rushed lunch at the office. Of course, there’s still the fact that you’re eating Hot Pockets. I don’t know if you noticed, but all the other grown-ups brought Lean Cuisines. You better hope they don’t find out about your adult Underoos.

The SideShots come in two packages of two. I found that two of them worked well for me as a sort of half-snack half-meal, but someone with a less delicate, feminine appetite could probably eat the whole box and call it a day.

What I didn’t expect when I opened the box is that the two SideShots per pack come attached to each other. My immediate thought was, of course, “BOOBS!” Then I read through Marvo’s review and saw that he’d already made a bra joke, totally destroying my bun pun.

Okay then.

Hot Pockets SideShots are in late telophase of the microwaveable snack mitosis cycle, wherein each individual SideShot has developed its own distinct sloppy joe nucleus and a bready cell plate has formed between the two. Cytokinesis occurs after the brief heating period has been completed, when the consumer of the SideShots separates the two distinct meaty cells by means of some type of knife or other device capable of cutting them in twain.

Now don’t you wish I’d just shouted “BOOBS!” instead?

My SideShots smelled pretty good when they got out of the microwave. The bread was aromatic, and the innards had a generic sloppy joe smell to them. The enjoyment pretty much ended there, though. While the bread was really soft and had a texture I didn’t think any Hot Pockets product could achieve, the sloppy joe mixture itself left much to be desired. The tomato sauce tasted like a mixture of ketchup and Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-Os sauce. The little bits of meat looked like rabbit pellets and were incredibly mushy. When I isolated one and tried it without the sauce, it had absolutely no flavor, which is disturbing, since there was a taste of beef when I took a bite of the whole thing. Must be something they hid in the sauce.

I decided to take a look at the ingredient list, and found some unsettling phrases, like “cooked beef patty crumble” (contains 13 sub-ingredients), “dough conditioner” (I did notice the silky smooth surface of the bread!), and “dried egg yolks” (that just sounds wrong). There were promising ingredients in there, like green peppers, onions, and garlic powder (the former two were listed under the “contains less than 2% of” section), but very little of the spices and flavorings like these that you would expect to find in a sloppy joe actually came though.

When I said earlier that “I found that two of them worked well for me as a sort of half-snack half-meal,” I was speaking strictly from a fullness standpoint, not a flavor perspective. Hot Pockets SideShots Sloppy Joe aren’t awful, they’re just substandard and, frankly, taste juvenile. It seems like the same type of person who would glean enjoyment out of a cup of Easy Mac would enjoy this product. Maybe I underestimated Manwich after all.

(Nutrition Facts – 2 buns – 270 calories, 70 calories from fat, 7 grams of fat, 2.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 15 milligrams of cholesterol, 710 milligrams of sodium, 39 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, 15 grams of sugar, 10 grams of protein, 4% vitamin A, 8% calcium, 20% thiamine, 8% vitamin B12, 20% folic acid, 15% iron, 10% riboflavin, 15% niacin and 10% phosphorus.)

Item: Hot Pockets SideShots Sloppy Joes
Price: $2.49
Size: 4 pack
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 3 out of 10
Pros: Bun was soft. Mitosis. Cooks up fast. Boobs. Bun contains the filling without spillage. Kids would probably love the taste.
Cons: Beef was mushy, flavorless and looked like rabbit pellets. Adult Underoos. Sauce was disappointing and lacked sloppy joe flavors. Growing up. “Dried egg yolks.”