Fifth Post: Tesco Ken Hom's Kung Po Chicken with Egg Fried Rice.

Tonight on 'Adventures in Depressing Food for One' we will be examining Tesco Ken Hom's Kung Po Chicken with Egg Fried Rice.
I have eaten an awful lot of these during my University career. I would use the hyperbolic phrase "I've had this more times than I have had hot dinners" if that particular idiom didn't have particularly unpleasant connotations in this context.

Miranda: Oh goody!!!

Sarah: Those are somehow bland and disgusting, if memory serves me correctly. The sauce definitely doesn't taste of sweet and sour sauce.

May: Maybe you should try cooking from Scratch

I occasionally cook from scratch...why just this afternoon I made Croque Monsieur. [This was actually a lie. I made slightly fancy cheese on toast.]

Sarah: Come on Mike, get to the gratifying details of disgusting food. Is it humming away in the microwave? 

Yes. It's one of those annoyingly needy microwave meals that requires attention halfway through. Their curry dishes are much more self-reliant.

Sarah: I think I once had a delicious ready curry meal from Tesco. Might have dreamed it though. 

The ingredients are interesting in themselves. I fear that the only authentically asian part of the meal is the fact that the chicken came all the way from Thailand.

May: Oh a croque Monsieur, tres bien! [I feel awful for lying] Don't get me wrong your stati are educating me in the variety of ready meals. I'm not judging - I had a 2am walk in to take away dominos pizza last night. Im still struggling to rehydrate myself from all the salt but DAYUM It was goooooood.

The decanting process is an important part of my experience in ready meals preparation. Some are good, but this is not. First the sauce slithers out like an oilslick. Then the chicken and cashews slops out with an unpleasant plop. Finally whatever grim force is holding the rice in relents, and it slides out in an almost complete brick.

YUMMEH

 I really want to know what practice, process or purpose leads the chicken to take on this texture. It looks like a shoe indent in CSI.

I don't want to do this anymore

Claire: The pictures really add an extra dimension to your reviews. Before seeing them, the food didn't sound thát bad.

May: Grim

I think that this dish really warrants a blow by blow breakdown, because there's a lot going on here:

Chicken: Succulent and tender, even though there are clearly some dark arts at work
Sauce: Syrupy, but with a smokey edge. The Kung Po one is a bit nicer than the sweet and sour
The Rice: Chewy. Veeeeery chewy.
The peas in the rice: Kind of hard like bullets, but once crushed they take on a chalky consistency
The egg: was actually hard to find any, as there doesnt appear to be much, and it tastes of nothing
The cashews: probably the worst part. They are clearly not happy to have been swimming in sauce the past few days. They have rendered down into some sort of wax. While they retain their original shape, they are fragile, and could probably be spread on toast.

I finished eating but the experience was so forgettable that I forgot I was writing this review. Brief roundup:

Sense of malaise: high
Width between chicken grooves: 3mm
Re-evaluation of my life: ongoing
Score: 6/10, simply mediocre.

Sarah: It almost looks like they formed the chicken parts with some sort of scraping machine. I shudder to think.

Tony: Why do you eat such awful food?

I have to satisfy my audience.