Price: $4.49
Serving: 3 slices, .46oz
Servings per package: ~5
Calories:70 per serving
 Calories from Fat: 50
Fat: 9%, 6g
 Saturated Fat: 10%, 2g
 Trans Fat: 0%, 0g
Cholesterol: 5%, 15mg
Sodium: 11%, 260mg
Protein: 4g
Carbohydrates: 0%, 0g
Fiber: 0%, 0g
Sugar: 0g
Weight Watchers Points: 3 per serving

Boar’s Head says: The premium taste of Boar’s Head Bacon is ready in just 25 seconds or less! Our fully cooked and naturally smoked bacon has all the taste of our regular sliced bacon, in a lot less time. Fourteen slices have been separated into two individual pouches to keep bacon at its freshest, so it tastes great whether stacked on a sandwich, tossed in a salad, or served at breakfast. Boar’s Head Fully Cooked Bacon - big-time taste, in no time flat.

Abi says: Boar’s Head pre-cooked bacon comes in two packages with a variety of pluses and minuses. One one hand, you can keep one package fresh while you use the other. On the other hand, this bacon is all stuck together and might not come apart in perfect strips. However, if you just need to dice it you’re in luck because it will dice beautifully when cold, which is not the case with the Oscar Mayer version.

These strips are less like faux bacon and more like miraculously preserved thin strips of bacon. Each one looks and tastes like real bacon, with the smokiness and fat you expect. They’re also wavy, just like real bacon. You have to use all of the bacon within 14 days of opening the package, but I dare your household to not consume 14 strips of bacon in 14 days.

Most of my bacon use is for baked goods, such as rip-off Red Lobster cheese biscuits or green beans with bacon and sweet onion. Given enough coffee, I don’t mind cooking breakfast meat for breakfast - but to cook breakfast meat so that I can then bake it? Well, that’s too many types of cooking for my taste. After this experience with Boar’s Head, I definitely have to give them the thumbs up over Oscar Mayer’s Pre-Cooked Bacon. Looking back, its hard to believe that I gave the Oscar Mayer bacon five stars. But I guess they deserve it for being pioneers in the ready-to-eat bacon field.

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A note on Gluten Free - Heat Eat Review does not assume that products are gluten free. We only mark items as gluten free if it also says gluten free on the package. The same goes for vegan items. If it says vegan on the box, then we mark it as vegan.

This is NOT true for vegetarian items. Vegetarian items might contain all sorts of meat-based things like gelatin, rennet and ‘natural flavoring’ that comes from meat. If you really want to make sure that you aren’t eating or harming animals, go for the vegan items. - Editrix

For the 5th year, foodbloggers from around the world are joining forces to raise money for hungry children. On Heat Eat Review we’re taking part in this effort, helping to raise what we hope will be $100,000.

How are we doing that? We’ve joined Menu For Hope, a worldwide raffle benefiting the United Nations World Food Programme. That’s right, a raffle. With prizes.

Our prize: Award-winning blue cheese from Rogue Creamery

Heat Eat Review is giving away Rogue Creamery’s Champion Blues. The winner will receive three 1/4 wheels of Rogue Creamery’s gold medal-winning blue cheeses: 50th Anniversary Oregon Blue, Crater Lake Blue and Smokey Blue. All three cheeses are made by hand in small batches, with expert cheese makers overseeing every step, from stirring in the salt, to hand dipping, to turning the wheels.

Oregon Blue is the first blue cheese made on the West Coast, Crater Lake is made from a complex blend of molds from around the world, and Smokey Blue is the first-ever smoked blue cheese, redolent with a sweet, carmelized hazelnuttiness.

If you bought this yourself it would cost $99.00 plus shipping! But you can get 3 lbs 12oz of award-winning cheeses for a $10.00 entry. How to enter to win this prize (Prize Code: UW08)

How to bid

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope: links to all of the prize-listing blogs is at Chez Pim. But if you really, really want to win the Blue Cheese, just use code UW08.

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope5 to make a donation.

3. Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. Please specify which prize you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation.
You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code.

For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for UW08. Please write 2xEU01, 3xUW08

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so Menu For Hope can claim the corporate match.

5. Please include your email address so that Menu For Hope can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Price: $1.00 (on sale)
Serving: 1 box, 8 oz.
Calories: 400 per serving
Fat: 17%, 11g
Cholesterol: 18%, 55mg
Sodium: 41% (ouch!), 980mg
Protein: 11g
Carbohydrates: 22%, 65g
Fiber: 8%, 2g
Sugar: 2g
Weight Watchers Points: 9 Points

Michelina’s says: At $1 a box, we don’t really “do” product blurbs. Look at the picture on the box. Read the product name. Buy.

Mel says: I have faith in Michelina’s products, I really do. Being that they are on sale for $1 almost 365 days of the year at one of the 3 prominent grocery chains in my area makes me feel that the world is an OK place and my stomach will always be in an OK place as well. I also have a penchant for frozen Asian-inspired dishes, as they often live up to, and sometimes exceed, my expectations. I think rice is just an all-over better cooked-to-frozen-to-cooked carb than pasta. Also, rice-heavy frozen dishes made by reputable companies such as Trader Joe’s and Amy’s have previously been successfully enjoyed by my stomach so all-in-all, I had high hopes. Plus, if I could get yummy fried rice goodness in 3 minutes for less than a 20oz vending machine soda, WHY NOT? Unfortunately, this dish did not live up to my expectations, though I would say that it lived up to the expectations of George Washington’s smirk as he left my wallet and paid for this bland, yet edible item.

Michelina’s Shrimp Fried Rice claims it’s 8 oz, although its sordid contents tell another tale. I find it hard pressed to believe it’s over 7 oz and although I am used to frozen contents shrinking slightly in size when nuked, this one seemed to decrease two-fold. The picture on the front of the box clearly shows 5.5 pieces of smallish pink shrimp, 4 pieces of apparent egg and an abundance of shaved carrot, peas and what looks like diced red pepper (TBD). The first thing I noticed when removing the dish from the microwave was that it basically just looked like rice with bits of green and orange limply lying around. I double-checked the box to make sure that this was “Shrimp Fried Rice” and not “Plain Fried Rice with Colored Bits”, but alas, it was that of shrimp, and I trudged on. I guess you really can’t expect many shrimp bites for $1, but I literally counted only 3 pieces (as well as 3 pieces of egg), which was very disappointing, especially considering shrimp is the second ingredient on the ingredients list. Listen: for about $3, I can get a box of Chicken Helper Fried Rice (always on sale somewhere for $1), a bag of frozen Ocean Jewel Frozen Cooked Salad Shrimp (almost always $1 on sale) and a few eggs and make a shrimp fried rice that would be the Benihana to Michelina’s Panda Express (did that even make sense? Moving on…). Seriously though, this site is about buying and reviewing easy, reheatable products, not about how to survive college on a $5/week food budget, so I’ll continue describing the dish.

The shrimp had the distinct brine-like, frozen aftertaste that most frozen shrimp I’ve eaten has, so I wasn’t expecting anything more. Though the amount of shrimp was extremely small, I was satisfied with the actual size of the shrimp, which was that of your typical cooked-frozen shrimp variety (about nickel-size). I was also impressed by the amount of shaved carrot; once I stirred the dish around a bit, it added a nice touch of color if not a tiny amount of carrot crunch (note: tiny). The most disappointing aspect of this dish, however, is the overall lack of flavor. There really isn’t ANY flavor to it and that “non-flavor” is spread over the entire dish, making it a pile of nothing, really. Although the ingredients list such tantalizing flavor-improvers such as soy sauce (listed twice, actually), butter flavor, peanut oil and liquid pepper extract, no such flavors were detected. I could only make it through about 5 bites before I added some soy sauce and crushed red pepper flakes, to which the dish vastly improved (bumping it up from one star to two).

All-in-all, this dish is edible, if not utterly boring and lackluster. I would purchase it again, but only if all the other decent Michelina meals were sold out and if it was still on sale for $1 or less (which it seems it is, indefinitely). I must admit that if I didn’t have any condiments to dress up the taste of this meal, I probably would have stopped eating the meal and dug into my half-empty bag of oyster crackers. Bottom-line: $1-worthy, but there are better $1 meals that are worthier.

If you subscribe to Heat Eat Review via your feed reader or get reviews sent to your email, you may have noticed that hey, you don’t get to read the whole review anymore!

If you want to read the whole review, you need to click on the title of the review. It is as easy as that.

Why are feeds suddenly shortened? Well, after years of offering full feeds, Heat Eat Review is now being taken advantage of by people who don’t understand copyright and are publishing this content on other websites. They’re using the RSS feed to do that.

Unfortunately, I don’t get paid if people steal from the site. And in turn I cannot pay the people who write reviews about crazy, crazy stuff like the Batter Blaster and Bagel-fuls.

Finally, some good news: new reviews are up today at Snackity Snack and Imbibable.

Snackity Snack: Luna Bar: Peanut Butter Cookie
Imbibable: Trader Joe’s Tangerine Juice