Lean "Cuisine"

Throughout my middle 20's - around the time I met Tony - I ate a lot of Lean Cuisine frozen meals. A typical trip to the grocery store for me would consist of a box of Eggo waffles, a 12-pack of Diet Coke with lime and 10 Lean Cuisines. I lived alone, I worked a lot of hours and I didn't really have the utensils to cook much beyond scrambled eggs or grilled cheese (basically, a spatula and a frying pan).

Life lesson: This is what happens when you give up all your worldly goods in back-to-back divorces. You end up living in a two-bedroom apartment with no furniture, no television and no way to cook food. And the legal fees leave you unable to purchase new things for yourself. I spent six months sitting on the floor, listening to my radio. Not kidding.

When I moved in with Tony, I started cooking all the time and only ate frozen meals at lunch sometimes at work. Then, when I quit my job, I stopped eating them altogether. And now I remember why.

As things have gotten busier at work, the time for me to create a three-course lunch has disappeared. And though I broke down last week and had Dominos deliver lunch, we can't afford to do that more than once a month. (From both a budgetary and a dietary perspective.) So at the grocery store yesterday, Tony and I selected a variety of Lean Cuisines to have at lunchtime every day. This way, we can dine at different times, cleanup is a breeze and the portions are controlled.

The only problem is that they taste terrible. Honestly, today I would have rather eaten the cardboard box my Chicken Enchiladas Suiza came in than choke down the bizarrely flavored cat food-filled "enchiladas." That's not Suiza, people. And the rice had enough sodium to spike my blood pressure 100 points. Tony's Salisbury Steak and Macaroni and Cheese was a little better, but still nothing I'd eat again. (Honestly, I wouldn't have chosen Salisbury Steak in the first place, but he was in the Army, so he eats all sorts of stuff I wouldn't touch.)

What happened? Have they changed the formula? Did I get a bad batch? Were they on super-sale at Kroger because they were laced with inedible compounds? Am I going to die of food poisoning? Because I honestly used to eat at least five of these things a week and thought they were just fine. I never thought they were a culinary revelation, but they didn't make me want to yarf as soon as I smelled one, which was the reaction I had today. I'm furiously chewing a piece of Big Red right now to get rid of the taste and it's not working. The suiza won't go away.

Maybe I'm just too old to eat this way. I've always thought of the Lean Cuisine as a young woman's dish. Food for the single life. Something you eat when you have better things to do than cook, like go to the gym non-stop and fit into your clothes (That's what I did when I was dating Tony. I ate Lean Cuisines, worked and went to the gym. I cooked once every other week, on Friday, when he came rolling in to town.) I think that cooking for three straight years (because that's how long I've been in Cincy now, if you can believe it) has ruined my palate for frozen diet dinners. I can still put down some Stouffers mac'n'cheese, but the Lean Cuisine stuff tastes like rubber bands in yellow Elmer's glue.

You'd think with all the advances they've made in flash-freezing food that they could create a frozen meal that doesn't taste like astronaut food. Instead, I think they have just brainwashed all of us to believe that diet food is supposed to be punishment and that we should just pinch our noses and consume our 300 calorie meals in silence.

Well I for one refuse to go silently. I'll eat my Lean Cuisines, but I'll do it with a maximum of gagging and tongue-scrubbing. Because I'm not going to let the 15 in my freezer go to waste, no matter how awful they taste. My budget is stronger than my taste buds in this case.