When I was a college student I subsisted mainly on those cheap $1 Banquet TV dinners, the ones where the mashed potatoes were just a solid block of white paste and the gravy on the meat tasted like brown water, but hey for $1 it filled you up early in the morning or late at night when nothing was open.
More recently I have started to eat tv dinners once a week due to my more hectic schedule now, and it’s super easy to toss one in a microwave when I take a shower so by the time I get out it’s already fully cooked and cooled down.
Trying the cheap Banquets again, man they still suck (the recipe hasn’t changed in 20 years apparently) but now cost $2.25 in my area now. However the “Premium” Banquets (Mega Meat and Mega Bowls) are actually quite tasty. The Cowboy Chicken Mega Meat meal is a drumstick and a thigh that somehow almost tastes like it came right out of a restaurant even when microwaved, and the various bowls are also fairly meaty and don’t try to fill you up with their bad mashed potatoes and corn.
Hungry-Man used to be the “Premium” TV dinner growing up but eating it lately, all their meals taste incredibly soggy in a way that other microwave dinners don’t. “Selects” is suppose to be their own premium line but they all suck because their chicken is just awful. The only tolerable Hungry Man to me is the BBQ ribs.
Marie Callendars is basically what Hungry Man wants to be, you get less food than Hungry Man but the quality is so much better at the same price. They used to have a super annoying thing where the gravy you had to reheat seperately in its own plastic baggy but now the gravy is just automatically on the food which is so much easier to deal with when you’re in a hurry.
I’m curious how old OP is, and whether he remembers when TV Dinners were really TV Dinners.
Yep, that was the actual brand name back in the day: “TV Dinner”. This was back in the 1960’s. (Or maybe even late 1950’s?) We didn’t even have microwave ovens in those days, and the dinners came in aluminum trays that would not have been microwavable.
The phrase “TV Dinner” was another one of those brand names that became generic, just like Aspirin and Refrigerator and Kleenex.
I don’t remember how good they were (I was too young to have had much of a sense of that). I often ate them while literally watching TV, as the gods intended. We had these little metal folding tables to set up and eat them on.
Today, I eat some of the modern ones only very rarely.
I like (for mildish values of like) some of the Stouffer ones. I think the best is their stuffed peppers, but that may because I never bother to make stuffed peppers from scratch. The ‘bowl’ ones tend to be better overall. Maybe because they’re not trying to balance the cooking needs of separate items, just bung them all in together and make sure the ‘sauce’ aspect is spicy.
I’ve tried different brands of frozen dinners because they’re convenient, but my tastes have apparently grown more finicky over the years because few of them are worth eating more than once.
Stouffers isn’t bad (but their lite variant is). For some reason the only mashed potatoes I can tolerate are in the roast turkey and stuffing.
Mostly I’ve given up and now have leftovers instead.
I always have a few on Hand like Stouffer, M Callendar or Boston Market. I’m eating a Boston Market Beefsteak over Noodles right now and it is really good.
I ate a lot of TV dinners in the 90’s and 00’s, earliest I can remember was the early 90’s when my parents still treated them like they were something special. We would only cook them in the oven and about 4 at a time for the whole family. I forget if they were more expensive still back then but we rarely ate them which makes me assume they must have been more expensive than the $1 - 2 stuff you see now.
Gosh, I remember those pre-microwave aluminum trays that heated up in the over…
I think “frozen meals” serve a purpose. There are higher end ones that actually taste decent. I find the portions tend to be small (but these days, when I’m exercising portion control a lot, that’s not all bad) and you have to watch out for the sodium content in a lot of them. I try to keep a couple in the freezer for those nights I’m completely exhausted but need to eat something.
There are people for whom that seems to be a major part of their diet. If you picked your meals carefully you could probably do OK with that but I wouldn’t recommend it. Also, those who seem to depend on them most seem to opt for the budget ones.
I haven’t had one of the traditional TV dinners (meat, potatoes and a dessert in a divided tray) in a very long time but I have eaten many frozen meals. As said upthread, Stouffer’s frozen food is decent. In particular, I thought the lasagna was pretty good. And in recent years, there is a greater variety, with Chinese, Indian, Thai and other ethnic cuisines available. I like some of the frozen meals from Trader Joe’s but even a typical American supermarket has some that aren’t bad. (Not as good as freshly made restaurant meals but it’s convenient to have some in the freezer.)
I grew up in the 60s, and a Swanson TV dinner was a treat. Fried chicken, mashed taties, and corn. No dessert. We also sometimes had Banquet frozen pot pies for lunch. These days I usually have some version of Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine in the freezer for nights I don’t want to cook. And truthfully, I cannot make a stuffed green pepper as good as Stouffer’s.
I remember the ones in the aluminum tray that never heated up evenly. We’d have them for dinner if my parents were out in the evening. More often, we’d have the frozen pot pies that took forever to heat up in the oven.
Sure, I remember TV dinners, but I’d never purchase one today. I enjoy cooking, and to me it is better to make a meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans and have great tasting food for dinner and a few lunches than to heat up a bland mockery of a meal.
Ate them as a kid here and there through the 1970s. The actual ‘TV Dinner’ brand. I thought then, and still think now, that the mashed potatoes were the best I ever had. They had just the right amount of flavor and salt, and i liked the way they had just the most minor of semi-hardened “crust” from the molding of the aluminum pan/tray compartment they sat in.
I never liked home-made mashed potatoes, no matter who made them. Still don’t. They always used milk, or too much milk, the potato taste was far too “earthy”, and lumps of any size and quantity made me want to throw up.
You should try mine. Since I’m lactose intolerant I make them with no milk, just salt and pepper on fresh baking potatoes that give the best consistency. Then I take a heavy masher and mash the hell out of them until nary a lump can be seen.
Perhaps so. Strange at how so many, when it comes to food preparation are bound to convention/tradition and keep doing things the same crummy way. Other than using re-constituted dehydrated potato flakes, the only way I can see getting mashed potatoes lump free enough for my tastes would be to grind them between two 4-ton grist stones for 3 hours.
Despite that mild hang-up, I’m actually a very adventurous eater.
I eat a reasonably kosher diet (no mixing meat and dairy, no pork etc) and I’m now allergic to red meat (blasted lone star tick!), still as a couch potato I hold tv dinners in high esteem. OTTOMH right now in my freezer I have some PF Chang’s chicken, two or three Michelangelo’s egg parmesan, and a big bag of Banquet (they don’t use dairy in their breading) chicken patties. The last are surprisingly good- pleasantly spicy and not bland as I expected.