Where is the Banquet?

Today for lunch I had Banquet's Pork Barbeque patty with corn and mashed potatoes. To be honest, you would be shot in St Louis if you did a taste test between these and real ribs. Heck, you should be shot in South Carolina for even thinking that! Whether or not you like a dry rub or a liquid smoked pork bbq rib will not matter when it comes to these ribs, they are about as much a rib as I am Jamaican. I have had Banquet's Micro-waved "meals" plenty of times, most of those times I was broke and a bachelor too. They are like one step above eating Raman Noodles in my book and just a few steps below eating a burger off Burger King's dollar menu. I never really thought of the irony of the brand name Banquet until I started writing this review. There is a bit of false advertising with their brand name in my opinion, in order to better reflect their name they should be called "school cafeteria" or "Airplane Food". (I tried to come up with something better believe me, I am just not that clever)

Just look up what a banquet is on google image search here. The general populace has a different idea of what a banquet is and what they are selling for $0.88 a pop at Wal-Mart. I know, it is terrible that I am reviewing this product to begin with but when I think of bad, inedible food I think of Banquet. I used to eat the hell out of these things, I won't lie about that, but I was young and naive. You can't blame me for being young and broke. J

The one redeeming factor of this meal is that they barbeque sauce isn't as bad as one might imagine. The downside is everything else, literally. The packaging seems to be like every other microwave meal, except for the fact that the food compartments don't really hold the food as much as they kind of just have an idea of where they should go. The corn will be in the potatoes and visa versa, and there is always something from both sides in the main entrée section. I don't know why they even bother dividing the food, they clearly fall short with this in every Banquet meal I have EVER had. The sad thing is that none of that was an exaggeration. The "pork" was more soy than meat in my opinion. If you look at the ingredients it says that the pork bbq rib is pork and soy proteins. I think I could fool a vegetarian into eating this and they wouldn't even notice it was pork. On a side note too the potatoes looked like potatoes this time and not potato soup which is always an improvement. The corn was terrible, it tasted like corn but had the texture of raisins (just imagine that for a minute for me.)

Also, I tried to make this meal look good. I tried to make it as awesome as it is on the packaging and I failed miserably. There is no way that you can make it look that good, given the same plates and props you would find out that you are 4 oz of potatoes short and you would need real corn (not the corn-raisin hybrid I had to endure earlier.) I found that once I had the whole meal on the paper plate that I had way less than the promised 10 oz of food on the packaging. Looking at my abandoned sauce filled container I realized how they got the 10 oz mark that they promised… with about 2 to 3 oz of sauce. The sauce filled plastic container was not a surprise to me, it is the same tricks that canned vegetables have doing to us for years with added water content.

I really can't believe how many bad things I have to say about this meal, but then again I am not surprised.

In a word, this meal was not at all delightful.

Cooking time: 3 minutes, stir then 2:30 minutes
Stand time: 1-2 minutes

I am not going to list the nutritional information because you should not be eating this, but if you want to know who to blame click here.

Can you tell what one of these is the microwaved meal?