Crap, I've been working hard, not updating the website for the past couple of weeks. I guess I deserve a reward for making people bother me about when the next article will be up, or why the website's unexpectedly down for maintenance. I am an unimportant, fairly unpopular internet writer guy and I deserve a treat. Damnit.

What's a good treat? Ice cream for one. Maybe some candy. Sure, they're good, but they aren't great. You know what would be great? What a person of my non-status truly deserves?

Mother-fucking breakfast for dinner!

Hell yeah! That's just what the doctor ordered. Of course, just having a few pancakes, some eggs and a metric shit-load of bacon isn't very entertaining. And I suppose I've been slacking a little. Ok, time for a few adjustments to the plan:

Not as good as diner food, but infinitely more potential for hilarity.

I formally re-introduce you to Aunt Jemima. We've tangled with this frisky syrup-wench a couple of times. First was back, a little over two years ago when Evan and I reviewed her Griddlecake Sandwiches. Seven months later, I reviewed her Scrambled Eggs and Bacon meal. Both times the results were unimpressive to say the least. It's time to see if the third time is the charm.

So, I'm not really sure what a 'scrambles' is, but I'm pretty sure it refers to the eggs. Scrambled seems to be just the only way you can find them when they're frozen. It's certainly more cost effective than figuring out how to prepare, package and freeze a million of the little bastards sunny-side up.

Wikipedia and Google were less than helpful. I'm going to go with the following definition:

Scrambles
(Sk-ram-buhl-s)
1. Noun; A dish consisting of scrambled eggs, vegetables and meat mixed together. Often topped with cheese.
2. Noun; A deviate sex-act where a woman is strapped to an activated paint shaker during coitus.
Example: After Mary and John had scrambles, they went out and had a dish consisting of scrambled eggs, vegetables and meat mixed together.

In the case of this dish, it appears to contain scrambled eggs, potatoes, crumbled pork sausage, cheese, onions and peppers. Come to think of it, this is starting to look a lot like a variation on corned beef hash and eggs, but with sausage instead of delicious corned beef.

And this is what it looks like:

Wait...this might be frozen chow mein.

Ok, ok, so it doesn't look promising so far. But, at least the cheese looks real. I was half-expecting a small dollop of electric-orange cheese substitute. Seeing grated cheese is beginning to inspire my confidence. This stuff might actually not suck!

While I throw this in the nuker to cook for 2 minutes, then again for 1 minute, let's take some time and review the rules:

When finished, I open the microwave and am greeted by two things: the searing pain of an over-hot plastic container on my fingertips and the acrid stench of sour milk and burnt cheese. Oh, this bodes well.

There's really no way to present this in a way that looks good.

Well, let's start with the eggs, since the sex act this dish is named after is in turn named after the eggs. I have honestly never had a good experience with eggs that came out of the microwave. In this respect, I am not disappointed. It's not that the eggs are good, it's that my expectations are so low to begin with, these incredibly bad-tasting eggs somehow fail to break through my apathy.

Let's start with the smell. Have you ever left a carton of milk in the very back of the fridge for a couple of months? You know that smell when you open the fridge? The not-quite strong, but certainly omnipresent stench of sour milk? These eggs smell exactly like that. They smell like two-month old milk stink. I couldn't say why they smell this way, and frankly I'm not sure I want to find out. They smell like bad milk, and I'm going to leave it at that.

Next, let's talk about the texture. Scrambled eggs should be light and fluffy, like cherubim were gently caressing them in the pan. These scrambled eggs have the consistency of an old tire: hard and rubbery. There's a dick joke here, but I can't get it to fit (that's what she said).

As for the taste. Well, remember when I said that the eggs smelled like poor people? They taste almost like eggs, but there's still a taste of sour milk to it. In ordinary circumstances, I'd be salting the ever loving shit out of these eggs, and drowning them in hot sauce. Unfortunately that's not allowed, so I've got to eat my shitty eggs in all their sour-milky glory.

Smell: 1/10
Taste: 2/10
Mouthfeel: 1/10
Total Score: (1.3/10)

Potatoes, as I've probably said many times in the past, are probably the perfect food. They're a staple food that you can easily eat alone for a meal. They can be cooked a billion different ways, and they're nearly impossible to fuck up. For bonus points: What's the most popular way to prepare potatoes that are eaten at breakfast?

If you answered with 'fried', then you are correct. If you had any other answer then you are likely not of this planet. Please return forthwith to your place of origin or to your nearest convenient parallel dimension.

That said, these potatoes are boiled. Not fried, with crisp little golden edges. They're fucking boiled, then given a half-hearted little skimming in light oil. These aren't fried. These wouldn't pass the test of the weakest diner in the world. These are sad little potatoes and they should be ashamed of themselves.

So, these boiled little fucks are pretty bland, which is to be expected because somebody dunked them in boiling water instead of cooking them properly. They're barely seasoned, and appear to be used entirely as filler. That said, they're potatoes, and while cooked incorrectly, they aren't cooked badly. Like I said, it's damn near impossible to fuck up a potato. Even if you have a stroke and decided to boil them for breakfast.

Fuck!

Smell: 6/10
Taste: 4/10
Mouthfeel: 7/10
Total Score: (5.6/10)

Three of my favorite food-related words are 'pork', 'sausage' and 'crumble'. (Bacon is also in this list, but we can't have everything.) So, pork sausage crumbles appear to be little chunks of pork sausage meat without casing. They seem to cook in a shape that suggests that they crumbled from the mother sausage. They might also be called pork sausage spores, but that doesn't seem nearly as appetizing.

So, these little grey chunks of meat kinda smell like sausage. There's nothing to write home about. They taste of sausage too, specifically breakfast sausage, which is appropriate. They have a peppery aftertaste as well, so you can be sure that there is some black pepper somewhere in that meaty amalgamation. Unfortunately, like the eggs, they're somewhat tough, which detracts from their overall appear, and gives the entire meal the consistency of gristle mixed with rubber.

Smell: 5/10
Taste: 8/10
Mouthfeel: 3/10
Total Score: (5.3/10)

Technically, I should review all this shit, since they're listed as major components, but I've got two big problems:

1. There's not enough of them to make a valid opinion.
2. They're all fused together into a single mass.

It seems that during cooking, the few pieces of onion and pepper became fused together in the cheese, and formed some unholy union, likely never seen outside of a Super Bowl party (or Wisconsin). So, I'm just going to review them all at once.

The mass smells faintly of cheese and onion and contains what appears to be white onion and green bell peppers. All seem to be more or less authentic foods, and they taste more or less the same. There's nothing to write home about here. It's all very average. This is the beige of industrial kitchen accidents.

Smell: 6/10
Taste: 5/10
Mouthfeel: 4/10
Total Score: (5.0/10)

Smell: 4.5/10
Taste: 4.8/10
Mouthfeel: 3.8/10
Total Score: (4.3/10)

Once again Aunt Jemima does not disappoint. I thoroughly expected, based on past experiences, to get a lower-than-average breakfast meal that made me angry at the world and gave me heartburn, and that's exactly what I got. I hear that Aunt Jemima makes frozen pancakes too, and eventually I'll have to try them. Given the company's total devotion to breakfast foods, and syrup in particular, I expect those to be the best frozen fucking pancakes I've ever bought from a store.

As for the eggs, I'm willing to make a deal with all the frozen food company people who stop by here. If you stop putting scrambled eggs in your frozen breakfast meals, I'll stop telling you that they taste like shit and old people. It's not that they can't be done well. They certainly have in the past. The key with frozen scrambled eggs is that you can't make them the main focus. They work better as an accent. Until we, as a civilization, can come up with a way to properly freeze scrambled eggs so they don't taste horrible, we should probably stop making them.

Bottom line is this: Stop boiling your breakfast potatoes!!! What the hell is wrong with you? Just fry the little fuckers! Holy shit, I need some asprin or something.

• Horrors of the Ice Box Archive
• Horrors of the Ice Box: Aunt Jemima Griddlecake Sandwiches
• Horrors of the Ice Box: Aunt Jemima Scrambled Eggs and Bacon
• Horrors of the Ice Box: President's Choice General Tao Chicken