There are days when I'm just too busy to cook, and I wanted to find some good frozen entrees as an alternative to pizza. These cook up in a skillet in 10 minutes. They consist of pasta, the protein, and sauce nuggets that melt to just the right consistency.



Chicken Florentine with Farfalle (bow tie pasta) was my favorite. The sauce was not loaded down with cheese, it was just tasty and nice. Of course you can probably do better from a good recipe, but the time saving makes up for it.



My second favorite was Shrimp Scampi with Fettucine. It didn't transport us, but was okay. You'd think the shrimp might get overcooked, but it doesn't.

The worst one was the Chicken Parmigiana with Penne. I don't mean this comes in third, I mean it's not worth buying. The problem is that there isn't enough meat. There were probably 4 or 5 very small pieces of chicken with lots of breading.



Years ago I tasted a frozen entree sold by Schwanns, and it was excellent. In case you aren't familiar with Schwanns, they deliver frozen food to your home, and I don't know if it's still being done, but people would give them a key to the house so the delivery guy could come in and put the food in the freezer when you weren't home. Their ice cream is really good. I'm pretty sure if you see them on the street you can flag them down and they'll sell you something. I've never gotten started with Schwanns because I would spend too much money and I can cook my own good food, but I think they are great for certain situations.

In the process of looking for pictures, I looked up the original TV dinners.

I didn't know Swanson had an International line. It almost looks good:



At some point instead of the potatoes, the starch in the German style was Spaetzl with crumbs on top and the dessert was apricot and prune compote. Besides the German one, there was Chinese style (chicken chow mein, fried rice with egg, sweet-sour sauce, and what fried shrimps); Mexican style (Mexican rice, refried beans, 'a big beef enchiladas and two beef tamales", and authentic pepper sauce); and Italian style (authentic lasagna with meat and ricotta cheese, chopped spinach Italienne, and famous tortoni pudding, with juicy peach and apple slices).

And look at this one with the chicken noodle soup appetizer:



Here is how I remember them. For someone who grew up on good homemade food from scratch, the processed flavors and textures were fascinating, especially those pasty whipped potatoes. They could claim they were German style, but it's like lipstick on a pig - still a pig.





The Banquet Salisbury Steak dinner was particularly classic with those soggy little diced carrots and peas, and look at the price stamp: 49 cents. Can't beat that.

Here is a little blurb about the history: "The product was cooked for 25 minutes at 425 °F (218 °C) and fit nicely on a TV tray table. The original TV Dinner sold for 98 cents, and had a production estimate of 5,000 dinners for the first year. Swanson far exceeded its expectations, and ended up selling more than 10 million of these dinners in the first year of production."

Here is a more current version:





I remember tortoni pudding from those days, sometimes referred to as biscuit tortoni, but not what it tasted like, so here is a recipe. If I was going to make it, I'd do the pudding from scratch.

Tortoni Pudding

1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 lb melted butter
1 (2 ounce) package sliced almonds
1 cup flour
1 1/2 cups flaked coconut
2 (3 ounce) packages instant vanilla pudding
2 2/3 cups milk
1 (16 ounce) container Cool Whip

Combine brown sugar, butter, almonds, flour and coconut. Spread on cookie sheet or jelly roll pan and bake at 325 degrees until light brown. Stir several times for even browning. Remove from oven and let cool.

Combine pudding mix and milk. Beat according to pudding directions. Fold in 3/4 of the container cool whip into pudding and chill overnight or for at least 2 hours.

To serve, Place 1/2 of coconut crumb mixture in bottom of large glass bowl or serving dish. Add pudding and top with remaining coconut crumbs. Or top with rest of cool whip and serve rest of coconut crumbs on the side.