Proper disposal of Banquet Pot Pies:
If your Banquet Pot Pies (chicken or turkey varieties) has the code P-9 printed near the ‘Use By’ date, you need to toss the pot pie and take the empty box to your grocer for a refund.

Do not eat the pot pie!

(1:52:49 PM) Abi: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21214391/
(1:53:25 PM) Nicole: I never get the turkey, just the chicken
(1:56:16 PM) Abi: the recall is for chicken and turkey both
(2:00:17 PM) Nicole: oh. sucks
(2:00:25 PM) Nicole: luckily, i have none right now
(2:00:33 PM) Nicole: so if i got part of the bad batch, i already ate it
(2:00:53 PM) Abi: well, salmonella doesn’t affect most healthy adults. I think.
(2:01:03 PM) Abi: we probably get it all of the time. sad, eh?
(2:02:02 PM) Nicole: i think “healthy” would be an exaggeration for me

At this time, all I can tell you is that the recall is at the point where Banquet has shut down production lines for both chicken and turkey pot pies. The salmonella cases are confined to the Midwest, so those poor folks are getting double-whammy of unsafe frozen foods and horrible weather.

UPDATE: ConAgra, the maker of Banquet Pot Pies is now requesting that stores pull the pies from shelves. The recalled pot pies have now sickened over 150 people in 32 states, fortunately nobody’s met death by pot pie.

UPDATE #2 (Oct. 18, 2007): You should now by now not to eat these. And the folks sickened count is up to 174 in 32 states with dozens hospitalized. Do not eat the pot pie.

Need other non-pot-pie Banquet? Check out our category of Banquet Frozen Meal Reviews. They were mostly written by Nicole, which gives some context to the above IM conversation.

Price: $1.00
Serving: 1 meal, 10.5 oz.
Calories: 400
Fat: 32%, 21g
Cholesterol: 6%, 20mg
Sodium: 30%, 700mg
Carbohydrates: 15%, 45g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Protein: 14g

Banquet says: Nothing. Apparently at $1 they can’t afford people to write copy for their packaging. But hey, it’s spaghetti and meatballs.

Brandon says: Banquet’s Spaghetti and Meatballs entree didn’t look all that exciting to me in the freezer, but since all these were on sale and I had several of the other meals in the cart already, I grabbed a couple of the “S&Ms” just for kicks. I mean, how could they possibly mess up something as familiar to everybody as spaghetti and meatballs?

I was pleased to find that they didn’t package the sauce and meatballs already mixed with the noodles. The Budget Gourmet meals also tend to use this same strategy to great effect; keeping the juices away from the absorbent things like pasta or rice helps keep all the elements of the meal from tasting like each other. This was an effective move, saving the entree from being a frozen version horrible canned pasta and sauce items. I was pleased that the noodles stayed largely intact and unsaturated with what little sauce was in the tray.

Yes, the lack of sauce was a bit upsetting to me. Growing up, I was a sauce guy and still am one. That’s where the flavor comes from! Admittedly, there wasn’t much sauce depicted on the package, but I was still surprised by the lack. An extra tablespoonful or two wouldn’t have killed them.

Fortuntely, I was pleasantly surprised by the meatballs. They were pretty darn good and there were six of them, more meat than I would have expected in a dollar meal. Their meaty presence somewhat mitigated my disappointment in the lack of sauce.

The other problem? Not enough cheese in the meal. I had to scour the ingredients list to verify there was in fact parmesan cheese in there. And there was, but I couldn’t tell. Maybe they need to add some grated parm in there on top of everything just to add that little extra texture and concentration of taste that people look for when they see it on an ingredients list.

Anyway, it was spaghetti and meatballs for a dollar, and it was decent but nothing special. It felt like a reasonable small meal. I’d buy it again, but not as a first choice — and only if it was on sale.

“Abi said that my enchiladas looked like donuts!?! I will never show Abi my enchiladas again…”

Price: $1.00 (sale)
Serving: 1 meal, 11 oz.
Calories: 400
Fat: 23%, 15g
Sodium: 41%, 990mg
Protein: 8g
Carbs: 20%, 60g
Fiber: 24%, 6g

Banquet says: Two beef enchiladas and one cheese enchilada in chili sauce with mexican style rice.

Nicole says: This meal smells really good - it got a compliment in the kitchen. It looked pretty gross out of the microwave. Abi said that my enchiladas looked like donuts!?! I will never show Abi my enchiladas again…

The rice has a nice texture and a bit of spice and I detected a tang in the sauce. The enchiladas are decent - about as tasty as fastfood Tex Mex (without the fresh tomatoes, lettuce, and sour cream.) The enchilada “chili” sauce is a bit goopy, and I feel that some people might call it agar-like, but it’s got some flavor to it, though I don’t know where the get the name “chili sauce.” The cheese enchilada actually doesn’t taste all that cheesy, which is probably good because it looks a bit like Velveeta, the worst cheese taste on Earth. The beef enchiladas are reasonably yummy. This meal would have been quite good if I kept hot sauce at my deak, both to add some flavor and make sure the meal fills me up.

Price: $1.00 (sale)
Serving: 1 meal, 10 oz.
Calories: 380
Fat: 28%, 18g
Sodium: 40%, 980mg
Protein: 14g
Carbs: 14%, 41g
Fiber: 20%, 5g
Diet Exchanges: 2.5 Starch, 1 Medium Fat Meat, 4 Fat

Banquet says: Country style gravy and chicken fried beef steak (chopped and formed) with mashed potatoes and corn

Nicole says: In interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that one of my favorite breakfast meals happens to be biscuits and gravy. I am happy to eat my biscuits and gravy at any IHOP or at the New Transit Truck Stop or Honey Bee Diner in my hometown. This predilection weighs heavily on this review.

I was NOT excited about eating this for lunch. As far as I know, I had never tasted “Chicken Fried Steak” and didn’t think it sounded particularly appetizing. “Chopped and formed” on the box didn’t help. My apprehension grew when I removed the meal from the microwave after following cooking instructions to a tee (the minimum recommended times) and saw that the gravy had burned the plastic film covering the meal. Upon removing the film, I saw that more gravy had burned at the bottom corner of the meat section. That’s just not right, man.

These potatoes were a bit less buttery than is standard for Banquet, which I think is kind of a shame but probably good for my health; they are also creamier than I am accustomed to (from Banquet.) Not bad at all. The corn was moister than that of the Salisbury Steak Meal, for some reason-strange. It tasted just fine. Isn’t it a shame these meals don’t have creamed corn?

All of my fears about “Chicken Fried Steak” have been assuaged by this meal. Yes, the processing of the “steak” is a bit disturbing and ensures that the texture doesn’t remotely resemble a “steak”, but the coated ground beef patty tastes fine. I expected the patty to cook up a little crispy at least, but alas, the breading is rather soggy. The gravy is both creamy and oily, with a generous sprinkle of large pepper grains for zing. This meal is tasty enough that I could definitely eat it once a week. Especially for one dollar.

Thank you, Banquet, for proving yet again that all that’s required to make a meal tasty is keeping within the range of one-third of my Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of fat and approaching one-half RDA of sodium.

I licked the remaining un-burnt gravy out of the meat section.