There were a few holiday items that had to be tossed aside due to time constraints during last month's Advent Calendar, and the general consensus here in our apartment is that such items should be thrown in the closet until next year -- not in our freezer. Between the sixty-five cases of Shoutin' Orange Tangergreen and enough Choco-Diles to plug a dam, the ol' icebox can barely fit our cat's must-be-refridgerated ear medicine these days. Hey, I'll play my part. In an effort to clear out old stock, here's a look at another holiday edition Kid Cuisine. It's more tuned to winter than Christmas, so it's not that off-topic. And if it is...who cares? I'm on my way to see Burt Reynolds.

The succinctly titled "Snowman Shaped Mac & Cheese" microwave dinner combines satiation with crafts projects, and I can't imagine many kids who wouldn't be excited about it. Actually, I was charged with babysitting one of my 100 siblings' 100 children last week, and he took a particular interest in this wacky Kid Cuisine. Apparently, they're the natural standard for preteen easy dinners. Course, it was no easy task explaining to him that this -- a snowman-shaped mac & cheese dinner with cartoon penguins all over the box -- was "for work." I tried to bribe him away from tears with a really old package of Twizzlers, but licorice couldn't hold a candle to frozen corn and odd-shaped pasta. Five bucks did the trick, though.

Thar she blows -- within that freezer-burned mess of solidified liquids and liquefied solids, my attention was quickly drawn to the upper left compartment. Snowman-shaped macaroni is cool, and corn...well, corn is corn. That third compartment held the true magic of this particular Kid Cuisine entree, and I just couldn't wait to do whatever it was I was supposed to do to that mound of white gunk. If you're eagle-eyed (or just not at all blind), you probably noticed the end result of that white mound in the first pic. If not, read on, and prepare yourself for an adventure in food preparation the likes of which hasn't been seen since oatmeal started arriving with little packets of squirtable red gel that let you play Tic-Tac-Toe over bowls of oats. I didn't know if this was going to be "fun," but it sure beat watching E!'s True Hollywood Story about Emmanuel Lewis. I mean, I get it. He's fine with being small. I didn't need to hear it over and over again for a full hour.

Yes indeed, you're to use that lump of Oreo icing to create a -- icy drumroll -- EDIBLE SNOWMAN. What seems like a surefire way to ingest every last speck of filth and grime on your hands is actually a fun little project, as you roll the clump into the chambers of a snowman body. It works just like they said, too -- there's no signs of breakage, no mass frustration...it rolls perfectly into three progressively sized balls of fake snow, and when finished, you get to tack on assorted candy sprinkles for added effect. Take a look...

Beautiful, ain't he? I've named him "Meowy Cat." No particular reason -- I was just confident that there hadn't been any other snowmen named Meowy Cat before. He looks awful and nobody's going to eat him, but at least the name is all his. Here's a look at the appropriately nuked Kid Cuisine dinner -- an achievement in aesthetics that won't be reached in my apartment again unless a big owl flies through the window and shits all over me:

We live in a strange world, really we do. We live in a world where what's seen above is considered palatable. We live in a world where the phrase "my ass is like whoa" is considered a strong song lyric. We live in a world where kids are to manhandle candy dough with unwashed hands and eat it, capping it off with a spirited feast of gooey, photochemical mac & cheese vaguely shaped like snowmen. The corn didn't hurt nobody, but nobody wants the corn. I'm not sure if that'd be considered "irony" or just a general pisser, but micro-zapped corn isn't worth the trouble of figuring it out. Folks, this is your Kid Cuisine. I'd call it an anomaly, but I use that word too much. Let's call it a seahorse instead.

Eh, I still like 'em for what they are. We often speak of old grub we loved no matter how bad it tasted -- "Kid Cuisine" is that phenomenon for a new generation of kids. When I turn X-E over to my son twenty years from now....oh wait, no, Kid Cuisine will be long gone by then. Also, I don't have a son. Well, you know what I mean. As for my packed-with-things-we're-never-going-to-eat freezer, there's actually another Kid Cuisine entree hiding in there. Not Christmas-themed, but unbelievable nonetheless. The next time the mood strikes me to write about microwave dinners at 7 AM, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Past Kid Cuisine Exposes: Christmas Kid Cuisine, Halloween Kid Cuisine, Regular Kid Cuisine.

Cobra continues their Chia Plot later today. Sorry, s'been a long week.