Price: $3.19
Serving: 3 strips, .42oz.
5 servings per box
Calories: 70 per serving
Fat: 8%, 5g
Cholesterol: 5%, 15mg
Sodium: 9%, 220mg
Protein: 5g
Carbs: 0%, 0g
Fiber: 0%, 0g
Weight Watchers Points: 2 Points

Oscar Mayer says: Oh, I wish . . . I could give weekday breakfasts weekend taste.

Abi says: I’m not sure if I’ve said this before, but one of my favorite cooking sites is Kalyn’s Kitchen. I’m not on the South Beach Diet, but that doesn’t matter because the food she features on her website is just plain delicious. Plus, she always posts her recipes with pictures (I don’t make non-photo recipes) and she gives actual feedback and tips that are useful to real home cooks, not just chefs.

Recently inspired by a March spinach salad recipe, I decided to start making some gourmet style spinach salads. I live in California, so mine would need avocado and locally produced chevre and plenty of fresh organic baby spinach. I also throw in a bit of red onion and some carrots (they don’t fit into the salad very well but are constantly in the fridge). I topped my most recent salad with some dressing made from California balsamic vinegar, wonderfully green olive oil (Trader Joe’s), and a bit of crushed garlic.

Yes, I’ve already been converted to the stereotypical Bay Area yuppie cuisine. What can I say? It tastes good. Really freaking amazingly good. Fancy restaurant good. Keep some goat cheese and bacon in the fridge at all times good. I don’t want to leave the house good.

The ease of using Ready to Serve bacon was what made the salad a reality. All I had to do was open the package, pop my 3 slices of bacon on a plate (they come in three-slice sheets so portion control is built in) and microwave the bacon for 20 seconds. DO NOT MICROWAVE FOR LONGER. You might be thinking “Oh, but I like crispier bacon, so it needs more time in the microwave.” But then you would be wrong. The bacon will be perfectly crisp after just 20 seconds.

There were certain people I worked with in Washington, DC who were obsessed with bacon. When a fast food joint came out with a new bacon-based concept, the bacon-intense would show up in the office speaking about nothing but bacon. Bacon, bacon, bacon. While I still don’t understand that sort of devotion to a cured meat (yeah, bacon is good, but it isn’t that important), I appreciate that I can now add a little bacon to a meal anytime I need a sodium kick.

via videosift.com

Bibbity-Bobbity-Bacon!

Yes, Mr. Gaffigan appears to be a bit stretched. There’s not much I can do about that. The video doesn’t really even need visuals. You could just throw on a pair of headphones, pretend to be working on some spreadsheets, and try not to laugh about bacon.

Price: $2.00
Serving: 1 package, 3.8oz. (food) and 6.75 fluid oz. (juice drink)
Calories: 420
Fat: 20%, 13g
Sodium: 31%, 750mg
Protein: 12g
Carbs: 22%, 66g
Fiber: 0%, 0g
Weight Watchers Points: 9

Oscar Mayer says: Lean white turkey-cured, Kraft pasteurized prepared cheddar cheese product, Ritz crackers, Skittles bite size candies, and Capri Sun Wild Cherry flavored juice drink blend from concentrate with other natural flavor.

Abi says: I like lunchmeat. I especially enjoy that super-thin sliced lunch meat that comes in those 33¢ packets at the grocery store and have names like Land-O-Frost. I detest thickly sliced lunchmeat. If I’m going to eat meat that has been stripped from an animal, cooked, and then reformed into a loaf, I’d like it to be produced in paper-thin slices. Would you eat a hunk of proscuitto? No, you would wrap the nearly see-through slices around hunks of cantaloupe and call that antipasti.

Lunchables aren’t antipasto. They also aren’t that great of a lunch. The turkey featured a variety of odd textures within each meat circle. This wouldn’t weird me out so much on Thanksgiving Day, but when I’m dealing with highly processed meats, I prefer not to find that some bits are slightly chewier than others.

The cheese was a horrific block of bright-orange plastic. Not actual plastic, but metaphorical plastic. I understand that as I get older and my palate expands, that my tastes will change. Also, I live in California now and am surrounded by places that sell crazy amounts of cheese. Today at Trader Joe’s they were sampling Vermont Cheddar and Irish Cheddar with Port and at the Milk Pail they had something with blue mold and a fresh, spreadable goat cheese. Free cheese is everywhere! And with such luxury everywhere, I feel like an idiot when I get American Cheese.

I’m sad that it is even called American Cheese. America makes some of the best cheese in the world, but we stuck our country’s name on the worst cheese ever invented. How disappointing.

The crackers were just crackers, much like a cross between off-brand Ritz and Keebler Club crackers, but with less butteriness. I have not met a cracker I didn’t like unless you count the Whole Foods store brand of Triscuits. Those things were awful and are still sitting in my cupboard. I would try to feed them to animals, but the raccoons in Stanford’s Escondido Village are already quite aggressive.

This mostly awful meal was accompanied by two wonderful items: Skittle and a Capri Sun. While I could never bring myself to purchase a box of Capri Sun (they come 10 to a box, I believe), I do find a lot of pleasure in stabbing that sometimes ineffectual little yellow straw through the foil pouch. And the Skittles? Well, you can’t really go wrong with Skittles.*

Now that I’m an adult, I understand why my mom never wanted to buy Lunchables for me or my brother. Sure, they were fun and involved miniature cold cuts, but with all of the sodium, possible chemicals, and bad cheese, she was steering me clear of a potentially distastrous palate-hindering experience.

*I originally wrote this thinking of the goodness that exists in the form of Original Skittles, Sour Skittles, and occasionally Wild Berry Skittles. However, I quickly remembered a flavor of Skittles that all but one person in my office’s cube area found completely disgusting: Carnival Flavor Skittles. Nasty, nasty stuff.