43% Chicken

Ever have one of those moments when you bite into something and it just doesn't taste like you expect it to?

Yeah.

So I'll admit...it's hard to cook here.  The main reason is probably due to the fact that my flat doesn't have full refrigerators--we just have a few mini ones in the kitchen to share between 7 people.  There's no real freezer space either.  If I want to buy lots of separate ingredients, there is simply no place to put them.

This means I eat lots of prepackaged meals.  It's not my ideal eating situation, but I manage.

However.

I'm finding that the prepackaged meals with meat are...how to say this...not...so...delicious?

For last Sunday I bought a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding meal.  This is the quintessential Sunday dinner in England, and the meal looked pretty good.  Not only did it have roast beef, gravy, and a Yorkshire pudding, but it also had roast potato chunks and peas with carrots.  I decided to try it out.

The vegetables and the Yorkshire pudding were great.  It reminded me very much of the stuff my mother makes for Sunday dinner.  But the 'roast beef'?  It turned out to be rather rubbery and had a rather unpleasant taste...it didn't really taste like beef to be honest.  To be fair though, it could have just been that meal, right?

Well, tonight I had some 'southern style chicken sticks' (as the label proclaimed).  I cooked them, and low and behold on my first bite I think, hmm, that isn't precisely bad, but it doesn't really taste like chicken.  What do you know.  I noticed the 'chicken' inside the breading was kind of purplish colored.  Suspicious!

I look on the packaging and discovered the filling was only 43% chicken.  What?!  What was the other stuff?  Apparently flour, mustard powder, onion, potato, and beet root (hence the purple coloring I imagine).

Um.  Okay.  I never really got it why packaging in the U.S. always exclaimed proudly on the front '100% real meat'.  Now I know.

I think I'll cook my own meat from now on.

P.S.--Lindsay, I tried the 'Prawn Cocktail' potato chips.  They were actually surprisingly good.  They didn't really taste like shrimp though--more like cocktail sauce.  They had a nice tang to them.  :)