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.

MY Take on The Breakfast Sandwich

It’s true. I am lazy. And that overpowering lazyness is fueled by cheap, premade breakfast sandwiches that I just can’t be bothered going through the rigamarole (real word, check it) of making one myself, no matter how cheap it ends up being in the long run. It’s just simply too awesome to roll out of bed, go downstairs, walk 40 yards, give a person some pocket change, and be handed a smoldering, delicious hodgepodge of molten cheese, succulent sausage, and fresh (maybe) egg, served up on a toasted tea biscuit. Adjective overkill for the win!

Anyways, I won’t bore you with the technical details. We’ve probably all eaten an Egg McMuffin at one point in time or another, so you know what I’m talking about. Also… well… I’m lazy and Nik’s already said it all.

I’ve always been sort of a fence-sitter when it comes to the Egg McMuffin. I don’t really agree with a lot of McDonalds methods, and if I want a fast food hamburger, I avoid the place like the plague, but there are many times that a quick, cheap, accessible breakfast has gotten me through some rougher-than-usual mornings. Because of this, I’m a little biased, since the Egg McMuffin served it’s sole purpose, and sated my hunger. So, when it comes to actually picking up the new Tim Horton’s Breakfast Sandwich (doesn’t really have that same, iconic ring to it that Egg McMuffin has, does it?), with the intention of analyzing and critiquing it, it was a little difficult. I mean, it’s just a sandwich, right?

Wrong.

Okay, I’m being dramatic. It is just a sandwich. Nothing extraordinary, but nothing terribly mundane either. I’d have to say, compared to the Egg McMuffin, I preferred the THBS. I picked one up, with a medium coffee, and a new maple pecan danish (also new on the menu. I was feeling enterprising today) for just over $5. First off, let me say that Nik’s photo didn’t really do it much justice. In his photo, it seems a little distorted and it makes the tea biscuit look flat and wimpy. Speaking of the tea biscuit, I’m a big fan, it was different, and as far as I’m concerned, it handed the traditional english muffin it’s ass on a platter, and I really didn’t find it as greasy/burnt as Nik says. As for the egg, Nik’s right, it was really pre-fabbed and generic, in both texture and taste. I’d take the McDonalds poached egg approach over Tim’s scrambled-then-molded version.

Now, unlike Nik, I had the sausage version of the sandwich. I feel like the quality of the sausage exceeded that of McDonalds (no big surprise, McDonalds is pretty much renowned for their sub-par meat products). However, if I recall correctly, I feel like you get more sausage on an Egg McMuffin. Still, I’d take quality over quantity here. The cheese was better than your average sandwich-bound processed cheeses. It was still processed, but still had more going for it than the Egg McMuffin equivalent. So hot and molten-y. Good stuff.

Ultimately, I’m finding it hard to choose, so like so many other decisions I’ve had to make, I’m going to sit on the fence for this one. This is actually conveniently more literal than you’d think, as there’s a fence (along with a small parking lot or two) between the nearest McDonalds and the neighbouring Tim Hortons. If I absolutely had to choose, I’d have to go with Tim Hortons, because it’s about 20 yards closer than the McDonalds. England Lazyness prevails.

Sidenote: If you can think of a better name for the THBS, by all means, leave a comment, I’m interested in seeing what people come up with. I’m going with Breakfast Biscuit for the time being.

Tim Horton’s Breakfast Sandwich

For some time now I’ve been wishing Tim’s stocked something more breakfasty besides a bagel smothered in 6 lbs. of cream cheese, or a croissant. A few months ago, Tim’s introduced the Tim Horton’s Breakfast Sandwich to their US locations and it’s now available in Canada at select locations (for some reason The Toronto Star article says the breakfast sandwich comes on a bun.. it’s actually a tea biscuit). Tim’s has priced their Breakfast Sandwich to be in direct competition with McDonald’s, around the $2.49 mark. I have to admit that Tim Horton’s has to have balls the size of coconuts to take on fast-food breakfast champ McDonald’s, but it’s a logical step for Tim’s, as I’m sure people would love to have a one-stop shop for decent coffee and a fast breakfast.

Coincidentally, I recently went to McDonald’s for the first time in 5 years, and had an Egg McMuffin; I’ll admit it was a guilty pleasure.. and the coffee wasn’t half bad, too.

Greg and I decided to head over to Tim’s this morning to try out the new sandwich, and see what it’s like.

Nik – Breakfast Sandwich with Bacon
Cost: about $4.00 with a large coffee refill.

My first impression is that this thing looks like crap.. I’m not impressed. The tea biscuit looks a little burned on the edges, and the whole thing looks really haphazardly thrown together. The egg also looks really fake and molded (which it obviously is). I kind of like that they’re using a tea biscuit instead of the traditional English Muffin, though, it makes for something a little different. It’s also comforting to see that the bacon looks pretty much like bacon from home.

The cheese doesn’t seem to be as heavily processed as an Egg McMuffin’s, so that’s good.. unfortunately, the downside of its ‘realness’ is that it largely drowns out the egg taste; I think they’ve got to strike a better balance in that regard. While the tea biscuit is a novel idea, it was a little too greasy; every time I picked that thing up, my fingers felt like they were just dipped in oil. Tim’s opted to use a scrambled egg in the sandwich, and I have to say I’m not a fan of the texture.. it’s like a weird, stiff-foam kind of feeling which I didn’t find pleasant at all. I know they’re trying to differentiate themselves from McDonald’s, but I really think the sandwich would benefit from a poached egg instead of the current scrambled egg foam.

I really hate to admit this, as I’m a huge Tim Horton’s junkie, but I think that McDonald’s Egg McMuffin is better than Tim’s Breakfast Sandwich; and that’s not really surprising.. McDonald’s has been serving breakfast for over 30 years.  While Tim’s foray into the breakfast world is a decent first-start, I think it really needs some ironing out and perfecting in order to come into direct competition with McDonald’s.

Overall, I’d give the Tim Horton’s Breakfast Sandwich 3/5.

I’ll try to get Greg to write his review of the Sausage Breakfast Sandwich, but he’s a lazy fuck.  So for now here’s a picture of him: