When I was a kid, there was a certain meal choice that would make my night. I craved it so much that I would tell my mom to hang up the phone with Domino’s, drive past McDonald’s, and take me right to the grocery store. From there I would go straight to the frozen aisle and plead with my parents to buy me a Kid Cuisine TV dinner.

This box is a fond memory from my childhood. I loved Kid Cuisine TV dinners.

Now, to be fair, I might have embellished my opening paragraph a bit. I don’t know if I actually ever did choose a TV dinner over pizza delivery or fast food, but I did seriously really like Kid Cuisine products.

And to this day, I don’t know why. 😂

I can still see, smell, and taste them. It would come in a tray with different compartments for an entrée, fruit/vegetable, potato item, and dessert. Portions were rather microscopic and the food was…well…edible?

I would get the pizza or corn dog box—which was by far the best part of the meal—and from there things would get sketchy. It was impossible to evenly heat the entire dinner and quite often items from one compartment of the tray would inextricably find themselves in the compartment of another. If you like corn in your chocolate cake I guess you would be in luck but it definitely wasn’t my cup of tea.

Oh man, memories are flowing right now. If your entrée came with French fries, you could look forward to three mini crinkled cut fries in the corner compartment. If you had the baked apple slices, the sour sauce would burn your tongue off. If you had pudding for your dessert, you might reach something that resembled the consistency of pudding after you dug through the crust at the top.

The exterior packaging was slick but the actual food was a different story.

But you know what? I seriously loved these dinners. And let me tell you, Kid Cuisine did much more to market to children besides adopting a name with “kid” in it. The packaging was colorful, a penguin mascot adorned the box, and I am pretty sure some of the dinners came with stickers or other cheap “prizes.”

Safe to say, there are just things that you eventually grow out of. Happy TV Dinner Day! I hope you can celebrate with something a bit more age-appropriate like Stouffer’s or Hungry-Man. Don’t Blink.