Dinner tonight came right out of the freezer.  All of it.  The whole thing.

Slightly unusual, I know, but I just wasn’t in the mood to cook tonight.  Also unusual.

But having a meal like this now and again makes me realize how much better food is when I actually do cook it myself.

The best part of the meal was probably the little tacos.  It’s kinda hard to screw up a crunchy little corn tortilla.  The orangish-blob in the center of the plate is cheese enchiladas.  I admit that I am not overly-familiar with frozen cheese enchiladas, but these were nothing to write home about.  They filled a void.  And they also do not transfer from cardboard container to plate.

The tamale was not bad but really could have used that wonderful brown sauce from Johnson’s Tamale Grotto in San Francisco.

Johnson’s…  ::sigh:: They were at 24th & Vicente and made the best tamales around.  They were “cup” tamales.  Not rolled in husks, but formed in cups.  They had a turkey tamale – made with fresh-roasted turkey, of course – that was out of this world.  With rice and beans.

Those were the days… I guess it’s a bit unfair to try and compare frozen concoctions with freshly-made items of my youth, but it really does bring home the point that even fast-food once upon a time, was really, really good.  We had several take-out-type places in the neighborhood that served some really fine food.  They took pride in what they served and sold.

Then, again, people had different standards about what they would eat.

As a kid I didn’t eat a lot of frozen foods because there were six of us kids – and frozen food was expensive.  I remember the extremely rare times we actually got to eat a Swanson’s TV Dinner!  My favorite was the Salisbury Steak.  Or a frozen pot pie (back when there was a top and bottom crust!)  They were so much fun – because we never had them.

After moving out of the ancestral home I never had frozen food because I worked in restaurants.  I ate fresh.  Heck, for the longest time I rarely shopped for groceries at all except for Coca Cola and Dorrito’s.  (Great for the munchies…)

So…  dinner tonight wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t fresh, homemade, or out of the Johnson’s steam table.

I probably won’t be making it a weekly dining experience.