Yeah, yeah, I've heard it all before: "I only eat fresh food. I never buy that frozen stuff." Bullhockey. If nobody ever bought frozen dinners, grocery stores wouldn't have to stock them in their own, specially designed freezer chests. Frozen dinners are for people who don't feel like spending the money or energy to make a proper meal, people who just plain don't know how to cook, and single people who have resigned themselves to how horribly, horribly single they actually are. There's an appeal to frozen dinners beyond the convenience, though. Sometimes you just want, like, a cup of corn, one chicken leg and what could probably be described as a dripping handful of mashed potatoes. If you can get all that for five bucks and ready to eat in 10 minutes, you sometimes give in to temptation. But not all frozen dinners are created equal. Let's run down some of the regulars, shall we?
Hungry-Man
Ah, the undisputed king of frozen dinners. The good folks at Swanson know what they're doing in the pre-cooked, flash-frozen food department. I recall one particularly lonely night in college when I popped in a rented movie, threw a Hungry-Man dinner in the microwave and tried not to think about how the individual pieces of chicken don't seem to come from any discernible body part until after you've eaten down to the bone itself. I was surprised how not-greasy the chicken was. In fact, I was so delighted that I hadn't been doomed to eat a sponge full of liquid fat that for the first and last time in my life I actually considered writing a letter to the company. I even composed it in my head. Should I be ashamed of the combined humiliation of this moment from my past? Yes, yes I should, but that doesn't change the fact that Hungry-Man makes the least offensive frozen dinners on the market.
Claim Jumper
I grew up in Ohio and now that I'm in Washington I generally avoid chain restaurants. I don't count fast food in that category, if only because the convenience trumps everything else when it comes to fast food. Sit-down chain restaurants are pointless if you live in a big city. They're no cheaper than local restaurants and the food is terrible. Consequently, I've never been to a Claim Jumper restaurant, a franchise that only stretches as far east as Illinois. Unlike other chains like Friday's that are content to only market their appetizers in the frozen food section, Claim Jumper has decided to foist whole meals on the eating public. Are they good meals? Hell. Freaking. No. They break all the rules of frozen dinners. Rubbery, over-salted and impossible to cook evenly, they take chain restaurant dishes and somehow make them worse.
Reser's
The people at Reser's have the audacity to call their products "fine foods" in an affront to both good taste and logic. Everything that company makes is substandard. Even their freaking lunch meat is inexplicably worse than any other lunch meat in the store. They're cheap, but that's about it. The Reser's frozen dinners are the absolute worst. It doesn't matter what meal you've supposedly purchased, they all taste the same. That's because they're all made from the same, deeply unpleasant composite meat product. They chicken-fry it, Salisbury steak it and Swedish meatball it, but that doesn't matter. Just imagine the worst possible proportions of fat, salt and, I dunno, fried hotdog meat to get an idea of what these things taste like. They're not just bottom of the barrel, they're digging into the damn ground.