Longtime readers probably remember my great fondness for Kid Cuisine, a series of old-style "TV dinners" aimed exclusively at kids and pop culture webmasters.
Course, I say "fondness," when the truth is that I've never written about Kid Cuisine without making fun of it. Just another coping device, see. If you set aside your fears of gloppy food and misguided flavors, Kid Cuisine is such a unique and fun concept: Microwave meals, scaled down to a size that will dissuade heart failure in small children, in all sorts of shapes and colors that are apparently all the rage with the pre-teen set.
My relationship with Kid Cuisine is usually limited to grocery store aisles, but this was an exception. I had to own this. Kid Cuisine's "Krazy Combo" is a wonderfully absurd concept that makes all too much fuss over a plastic tray full of sopping wet macaroni and cheese.
Most Kid Cuisine dinners have a theme, but "Krazy Combo" blends two distinct themes into one attention-demanding box of panthothemic acid. Here we get a "Monsters & Medieval" meal, thereby satisfying any underlying desires for knights, vampires and "m" sounds.
As usual, the box stars Kid Cuisine's duck mascot. I can't remember his name, assuming he has one, but he is indeed a duck. To illustrate the meal's impossible duality, said duck is shown both in a knight's armor and in a Frankenstein's Monster costume. Trust me when I say, I could count on one hand the times I've seen a package with knights and Frankensteins on it and not bought it. You don't have to be six-years-old to understand that life could only be improved by the addition of such things.
UPDATE: I'm now hearing that the mascot is named K.C. and is in fact a penguin. Seems my own old articles are in support of this rumor. Still, I feel justified in ignoring this since he is so obviously a duck.
It isn't pretty, but what do you expect from corn that has traversed the country at wildly varying degrees of tropical and subzero temperatures just so you can eat it? Alas, a moot point: Nobody eats the corn. It's just there so we can adhere to the newly-trendy Chinese tradition of always leaving something on our plates. Monsters & Medieval & Manners.
Incredibly, at least on a stretch, the theme works its way into the meal. "Medieval" is evidenced in the macaroni and cheese, with pasta shaped like knights' helmets, horses, castles and crowns. Though to me they all look a bit more like giant teeth. As for "Monsters," look no further than the dessert tray, filled with an assortment of creepy fruit snacks in the shape of Dracula heads and whatnot. This is all so much more exciting than I'm making it sound.
With these combos, Kid Cuisine's simply made something new out of something old. They had those same monster fruit snacks in a Halloween-edition meal years ago, and I'm certain that the knight-shaped macaroni are from some other old variety, too. Pretty brilliant way to put a warehouse full of rapidly expiring gummy mummies and castle pasta to good use.
If you'd like to read more about Kid Cuisine, it just so happens that I've written about it 15,000 times: Halloween Kid Cuisine! Christmas Kid Cuisine! There are others, too, but you'll have to work at finding them. You know you want to.
Posted by Matt on 04/16/2010. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
Ahh, Kid Cuisine. I remembered trying to consume it way back in the day. You’re right, no one eats the corn.
I miss doho’s site, but seeing his Twitter feed will have to stitch the wound in my heart for now.