Today was plasma donation, followed up by a Trader Joe's stop. I realized that since I'm only shopping for myself, I can get things that I actually want to eat, and I won't have to worry about whether or not I'm tying up the household budget and storage space in things that no one else likes. That meant that I could explore the store for things I'd never been looking for before. And lo and behold...

Trader Joe's has frozen orange chicken.

I was transported with glee! Orange chicken! Trader Joe's quality, Trader Joe's prices, and I now have a thermos-bag to take frozen things home by bus during the hot, hot days of summer! Alas that I had not made this discovery while the household was still intact!

I bought one package, to see how I liked it before committing to more than just a few meals of this. The down side of not having roommates is that one has to either consume all of one's culinary mistakes, or let them go to waste. So simple to cook -- toss the chicken in the oven, heat the packets of sauce, coat the chicken in the sauce and serve.

And the first taste was like the culinary gods forsaking me.

The sauce is tart with vinegar, not citrus. If tastes were smell, this would be the first fumbling attempts of the juniormost apprentice of a perfumer ejected from the imperial courts of Cetaganda for incompetence to duplicate by rote the scent of the rose from elemental building blocks. It tastes Western. It tastes of refined sugar and mass production. It tastes like mall food.


It's actually not too horribly bad once the sauce has had a few hours in the refrigerator to mix with the chicken.