Welcome to Crappymicrowavefood.com

Since the dawn of time, man has been hard at work devising ways to make food preparation quicker and easier. With the invention of the microwave, the ease of food prep took a huge leap forward. However, that convenience comes at the expense of quality. This website is dedicated to finding and critiquing the red-headed stepchild of the food world, the frozen microwave dinner. Only $0.99 in your grocer’s freezer!

UPDATE: 12/7/09
Each item will now have a rating system. I call it the Mudbutt Scale. The scale ranges from 1 to 10 with 10 meaning that you are very likely to shit your pants and 1 being unlikely that you will shit your pants.

Hot Pockets

Crack Cocaine to the Microwave Food Fiend

When all is said and done in the age of the microwave and we look back on it with fond memories of dried out chicken and those God-forsaken English peas in every bite, I do believe that Hot Pockets will reside directly below popcorn on the list of most popular microwave items. I have a sick fascination with these things. They’re made of a bread-like product filled with goo that’s flavored like things. They make all sorts of varieties, none of which are particularly good. But still I eat on…

I’d strongly advise against looking inside that bread. Devilry lives in there.

Mudbutt Scale: 7/10 – Only eat these at home, or in close vicinity to a friendly toilet.

Jeno’s Pizza

The perfect combination of cheap and awesome

Ok, so this technically isn’t a microwave food, but it’s cheap and it’s in the Microwave Food section. It’s also freakin spectacular. I eat one of these everyday when I get home from work. The cheese is a little sparse, so I throw on a bit of mozzarella, and by the time I’ve slipped into something more comfortable and mixed up a liquor drink, it’s done baking. These are 4 for $5 at the local Publix and they’re the exact same as the Totino’s Party Pizzas, which are more expensive. On a side note, I’ve never really figured out why these individual pizzas always go for the thick chunks of pepperoni rather than the thin round slices like larger pizzas. It seems to me like if they’d switch they could get away with less cheese. I learned at Papa John’s that the cheese is the most expensive single ingredient on a pizza.

Mudbutt Scale: 4/10

Rib-A-Que

Did they use a router to get those rib marks?

Ah, the boneless pork ribbed (shaped patty meal). Quite possibly my favorite Banquet meal. This was Banquet’s answer to the McRib, except without the sandwich. This was my favorite Banquet meal back in my college days. The rib (shaped patty) was actually pretty good, but the corn tasted like shit and the mashed potatoes always had corn in them even though it was in a completely separate section from the corn. I never understood how that happened. By the end of my college career I just cooked the meal, threw out the corn and mashed potatoes and put the rib (shaped patty) on some bread with some lettuce. Bam! instant McRib.

Mudbutt Scale: 7/10 These things were like playing fetch with a Pit Bull. Some days you could eat one and be fine, and other days you’d be heading to the bathroom before it was even out of the microwave.

A Cheesy Meat-like Experience

What are the chunks of red things in the cheese sauce?

If there’s a standard of the world in crappy microwave food, it’s the Banquet microwave meal. In many grocery stores these can be purchased for $0.99. This particular gem was provided by a coworker. He eats these things everyday. I haven’t gathered the gumption to try this particular one yet. I think my favorite attribute is the total government issued name. They at least could have tried to be clever. I think a 30 second romp through the break-room in the marketing department could have yielded something better than “Cheesy Smothered Meat Patty Meal.”

Mudbutt Scale: 9/10 While it’s cooling, start walking towards the bathroom.