For about 2 years I've survived on nothing but Marie's cooking. I wait until those frozen TV dinners go on sale at the Safeway and, man, I buy sixty of 'em at a time. No kidding! Marie has absolutely, hands down, the best TV dinners I have ever tasted in my entire single, happenin' guy, life. I throw in the "single" because that appears to be relevant. You see at the check-out line, everyone, aghast at the quantity of TV dinners, says "oh, you must be single". As if these were just prosthesis's for real food. (I throw in "happenin' guy" because otherwise the sentence would sound like I had several lives, like Michael Jackson or something.) I would like to reply, "No, actually these dinners were on clearance because they weren't refrigerated", but the mommy in my head spanks me before I can get it out.

There's a lot of interesting and unique things about Marie's dinners. They're not too expensive, they are usually no trouble to make, (more on that later) and you can be guaranteed that if Marie's name is on it, its going to be great. No kidding. Marie could make a brussel sprout and liver dinner taste great. I'm not one for experimenting with my dinner but I will eat anything that Marie puts her signature on and if Marie wants to use an excerpt from RANT on her box or in her ads, well she has my permission.

One of the problems I have with a few of Marie's dinners though are the expectations she places on the microwave oven operator. In one of the dinners you have to remove a chicken breast that has been freeze welded to the mashed potatos before you place it in the microwave oven for the first stage of cooking. In another one of her dinners, she expects you to use an actual oven to heat the French bread crouton thing while the rest of the spaghetti dinner is getting microwaved. Sorry, Marie, but this is one demographic you don't understand. If I had any intention of ever firing up the oven I would have plugged it in before installation. My oven is used to sort mail. By the time I realized it wasn't the kitchen filing cabinet, I had already invested too much money in the hanging folders and told everyone about the convenient light.

Interestingly though, until recently, there was no nutritional label describing just how good these things were for you. I have ranted to others of the fine quality and incredible taste of these dinners and their response was always, "They must be really bad for you. Did you check the nutritional label?" Of course my reply to these nay-sayer yuppie pin-heads was always, "How can you check the nutritional information on your moms cooking?" Talk about sour grapes!

Then one day it happened. A nutritional label appeared and something else happened...I realized that I had no idea how to read a nutritional label. I also noticed something else, Marie in all her splendor was just as generous as she was tasty! Suddenly I could see in black in white just how good Marie was being to me. Marie had packed not just one...but TWO dinners in this one little box! How sweet! And what value. All this time I had no idea these single boxes were meant for me and a guest. I suppose you'd have to be pretty tight with the person you're going to share with though because there's only one plate in the box.

I also thought it was quite interesting that the Marie folks were kind of laid back about this, the box states "ABOUT 2" for the servings contained inside. I understand that to mean a little over 2 and I guess that concedes that you and your guest may have a bit extra left over, so don't worry about fighting over that last noodle, there's plenty here. Of course maybe it just means that Marie is just not as anal retentive as the government wants her to be or it could mean that Marie sometimes provides more food in the box then at other times?

I've never seen that kind of statement before, but I was pretty impressed that Marie had the nads to put it on her box. Can you imagine this at the Marie factory? Some guy, Marie's dad, is asked about how many servings are included in the box and after playing "human scale" teetering a dinner in each hand, he replies, "Oh...'bout two I guess". As if the contents of this box aren't measured down to the sub-atomic level by a team of scientists expert in tv dinner physics and constantly monitored by huge robot noodle measuring devices.

Thank goodness for that warning too. Because I realized after doing a little math, that if this TV dinner was ever to be consumed by just one person...well...by God, he'd blow up like a cholesterol blimp, float over the city, and block out the sun. Gross.

I wonder why Marie did that? I wonder why she included an entire extra dinner in that box and didn't tell anyone about it for so long? Probably because she didn't want to create too much of a ruckus in the "grocers freezer section" between all the other TV dinner manufacturers that had the same size dinner but were only serving one person. I can understand that.