Tastes like Nostalgia

If you were a kid in the 90’s, you may have seen the awesome packaging of a frozen meal product called Kid Cuisine at the supermarket and BEGGED your parents to let you try it. I mean it had stuff like dino nuggets, fries, mac n cheese, maybe some corn... but what REALLY catches your eye is that chocolate desert that comes with it! Wow what a delight that would be.

And if you had cool parents like me, they caved and bought you one of these magical frozen meal things. 

So you took it home, opened it up, popped it in the microwave, and it took WAY too long to cook, but you waited with anticipation for it to finish.

And then... finally... it was ready. You reached in, picked up one of those steamy dino shaped nuggets... and then immediately dropped it because the temperature is close to the average temperature of the surface of Mercury. It’s HOT!!! So now... after having to wait 3 whole minutes for it to cook, you can’t even enjoy it because you can’t even touch it, let alone eat it. But your stomach is gurgling. And like it’s RIGHT THERE. It looks and smells soooo good! 

So you stab the nugget with a fork and try to take a nibble, and you instantly regret it. It’s just too hot. But... you’re eyeing that chocolate thing too. You plunge that fork into the mysterious but decidedly chocolate dessert and find that it’s ... gooey? Like really gooey. Not cakey at all like you’d expected. You lick it... and now your taste buds are destroyed because it, too, was the approximate temperature of the planet mercury. And that’s probably good because...

By the time your dino nuggets are anything else is cool enough to consume, you realize that the flavor is reminiscent of that candy shaped eraser you bit into in preschool and has the texture of soggy cardboard. It’s like eating a wet sponge. Ketchup helps though. You can drown anything in ketchup and choke it down. 

You try the corn... put ketchup on the corn... forget the corn. 

That dessert though... still hasn’t solidified into anything resembling a cake or a brownie. You read the box. It’s chocolate pudding???? But doesn’t pudding come in those little plastic cups that you can never sneak out of the fridge when your parents aren’t looking simply because they are impossible to open without their help? Who puts chocolate pudding in the microwave? But you’re determined to eat it because it’s chocolate. And you’re going to eat that pudding with a fork because... because... 

Anyway, you try it again and are astounded at how hot that little blob of chocolate can still possibly be after the full 5 minutes you’ve been waiting to eat it. And whether your tastebuds were just destroyed the first time, or it’s still too hot to eat, or if it’s just plain nasty, that pudding has almost no flavor. It still oddly looks like it should be cake, but it’s just not. It’s a blob of brown goop that if you think about it long enough may have the slightest hint of cocoa, but absolutely nothing like a pudding cup.

All in all, it’s probably the worst thing you’ve ever tasted in your life. But... next time mom goes to the store, you want another one. Because... it LOOKS way more amazing than it tastes and that’s how kids roll.

Haha... fast forward about 20+ years into my adulthood. My 16 yr old son and I were talking about Kid Cuisine and how awesome they looked but how terrible the food was. And one night I surprised him by getting one for both of us. (They still sell them!) And I gotta tell you... everything happened in the EXACT same way as it did when I was kid.  

Ahh... tastes like nostalgia. Some things never change. We both thought it was terrible... but we’d totally do it again.