President’s Choice Pad Thai Frozen Meal

 

 

“Rice noodles, tofu, scrambled eggs, vegetables, and peanuts in a mildly spicy sauce.”

Ahhh frozen dinners.. the realm of the lazy and the single since their inception more than 3 years ago. I decided to get President’s Choice Pad Thai dinner about a week ago so that when a day came when I was lazy and/or single, I’d have the whole eating requirement of living covered. I’ve had the PC Sheperd’s pie, which is actually pretty good, so I figured I’d branch out -ethnic style. I love pad thai, so I thought PC’s frozen dinner would fulfill a pad thai craving AND my hunger simultaneously. The thing’s got enough salt in it to kill a small African village (1188mg/ cup..YOWZA), so it must taste at least somewhat ok (no fat, no salt, no taste). I was to find out, however, that the President’s choice in pad thai is quite crappy.

The look of the fozen pad thai in the tray was pretty good, it seemed to have lots of noodles and sauce, plus it had a generous amount of chopped roasted peanuts on top (which is a MUST for pad thai).
Making the tray of pad thai was easy enough.. preheat oven to 375, put the tray of food in for 40 minutes, take it out, stir it around, put it back in for 10 minutes, and let it sit for 4 minutes (why the hell isn’t it 5 minutes??).. then eat. During the 50 minutes it took to make, I worked up quite an appetite, and the closer the time came for it to be eaten, the more I thought I could eat anything and think it tasted good.

The first sign of trouble was while stirring the pad thai around. I noticed that the veggies weren’t looking so hot. The formerly vibrantly green peas were now a sickly brown-green, and the carrots were quickly becoming a weird, paler version of their former selves.

When the meal was finished, the true extent of the horror became apparent.. in the course of cooking, the pad thai had become a big mound of sauce atop a pile of disgusting, mushy rice noodles. As I spooned it out into a bowl, the noodles were mushed even further into hundreds of broken mush-segments. The tofu cubes were insanely dry, and crumbled into a sand-like texture upon entering my mouth; in terms of the scrambled eggs, I couldn’t even find them, let alone taste them. The vegetables, as expected, had also degraded into an unattractive mushy texture. One of the few things that weren’t mushy were the noodles around the edges, which, thanks to the freezing, had remained rock-hard and really unappetizing. The only somewhat good thing were the bits of peanuts spread throughout the meal; they gave it a crunchy firmness not found outside of the freezer-burned edges.

All in all, I was really disapointed with PC’s Pad Thai frozen dinner, especially because I really love a lot of their other products (PC Organics Peanut Butter – Crunchy is the PINNACLE of peanut butter, and PC Blue Menu 100% Whole Wheat Rotini is also really good).

Pros

• It filled my stomach with mush and removed my hunger
• Peanuts bits weren’t bad
• I know never to buy it again

Cons

• Noodles degraded into mush, even when using the exact cooking instructions
• Vegetables degraded into mush
• Tofu is too dry and crumbly
• Salt content is REALLY high, especially considering it doesn’t taste that great
• Where the hell is the scrambled egg?

Conclusions

It serves me right for being lazy and not making my own pad thai. There are plenty of great pre-made mixes (powder or otherwise) that you can use to easily make your own pad thai, where you can ensure that your noodles, veggies and tofu are cooked how you like them.

I’d rate PC’s Pad Thai frozen dinner a 1.5 / 5.