There are very few things I hold sacred in my memory; I don’t have the best recall of any and folks have just come to expect that from me. Friends repeat the most benign information, family retells stories over and over and my dear wife is the worst sufferer of all. But over the Valentine’s Day Holiday, when my wife and I stayed in my mother’s empty house for the evening, my wife mentioned that we could do something we haven’t been able to do for probably years; we were able to get TV dinners! The stove in our current apartment maxes out around 200 degrees and before that we lived in Southern California (and TV dinners were just not part of the plan); prior to that we lived for three years in a Manhattan studio where the stove was occupied by an army of roaches; so it’s probably been 2003 or earlier when we were able to last enjoy TV dinners.
So it goes for my one memory of TV dinners from childhood, Budget Gourmet Swedish Meatballs. It was the once or twice a month bonus of having dad home in the evening and not wanting to cook. Budget Gourmet is no longer available, but Stouffers Swedish Meatballs has been an amiable substitution in the last few years.
The Stouffers Swedish Meatballs are not very good if the meal is not brought to the correct temperature. One mistake which I’ve made in haste more than once in the past has been to cook the noodles and the sauce too quickly and then leave the meatballs cold at their middle. This can make for a rather unpleasant meal. If you are cooking the entrée in the oven, I have found it is exponentially better than “zapping” it in the microwave; though my experience with this may be somewhat dated as I have not had a working microwave in the home I’ve lived in for more than 10 years.
One way to ensure that you don’t overcook any one part of your TV dinner, whether you are cooking it in the microwave or in the oven, is to monitor, rotate, and stir the contents at least once.
While, to many, I and my wife’s Valentine’s Day weekend might have sounded more like the plot for a horror flick (the fact that we were staying in an empty log-cabin style home in the woods of Connecticut the day after the latest Jason movie opened was not lost on me) all in all the weekend was made complete, at least in part, from our wonderful TV dinners; mine as the Stouffers Swedish Meatballs reminded me why I need to move into a home with an oven that works properly.
