The Michelina's DISadvantage (Michelina's Penne Pollo)

There’s an old saying that you can’t get blood from a stone…but apparently you can milk one to death. At the XX Olympiad, NBC Curling Commentators got their hands on a promotion from a local baker in Pinerolo (the Curling venue) – bread baked in the shape of a curling stone. To create his Ode to Curling, the Pinerolo baker used a dome-shaped bread loaf and jammed the tip of a super-size croissant right into the center. Not satisfied with just giving some coverage to the oddity, NBC scooped up a bunch of the bizarrely-shaped loaves and Curling Commentator Fred Roggin has been handing them out left and right at their Torino studio as gifts to studio guests. My take on the result of this Olympic moment is that this gesture might go over better if these yeasty gifts didn’t resemble a giant dinner roll with a honking big wrinkly banana sticking out of it. The bakers (Guido and his brother, according to Roggin) proudly display their creations in the bakery window, but NBC reports that local Pinerolo residents who are not familiar with Curling find the shape of the loaves “disturbing.” Tune in daily to CNBC’s nightly curling coverage (5:00 p.m. EST to 8:00 p.m. EST) to see which studio guest will get stuffed with “The Roggin Roll.”

And am I the only person who thought that the so-called “peace dove” made up by the white-clad spidermen looked like a drunken pigeon that had impacted your windshield at about 80 mph? After watching those guys shimmying up and down those ropes, I would have been willing to “give peace a chance” if they would just stop.

Back to work….

I nearly fainted when I somehow ended up at a Michelina’s of Canada website page - http://www.michelinas.ca/en/ - that stated “The votes are in. Canadians have-a spoken. This month' s favourite is: Penne Pollo. Pasta and chunks of chicken served in a creamy parmesan sauce.”

Now, I have always thought of our Canadian cousins as pretty much just that – our cousins; Americans with a funny accent and a slightly skewed way of viewing the world at large. But now I suspect that the differences between us may be vaster than I had thought, based upon these polling results. Why? Because I have myself recently tried this very dish, and it was…the nicest language I can find for it is: repulsive.

First, for those of you who have not tried a Michelina’s meal, be warned – the “packaging-as-serving-dish” idea is probably pretty clever from a cost-savings standpoint, but it’s a bit weird to use. Having to lift the now-hot container from the microwave to read the instructions on the box (they did at least think to put a second set of microwave instructions on the side of the box, so you don’t actually have to risk permanent scarring from burns by holding the steaming thing over your head to read the second set of nuking instructions) is annoying. Being only slightly careful, however, it is manageable, although I did not find eating from the box to be appealing in any aesthetic sense.

But, most importantly, the dish was just lousy. Not ordinarily lousy, but lousy in that special way that morphs into dreadful. The penne pasta was just penne; nothing noteworthy. The chicken – or, more accurately, the sole piece of chicken, approximately one inch square, was dark meat and contained something not meant to be eaten – either sinew or cartilage, so the remaining edible portion was even less than the original one inch cube. The sauce was insufficient to actually cover the pasta, so about 20% of the pasta was eaten without sauce…perhaps if there had been enough sauce, it would have had some flavor, but – to use a dreadfully overused phrase – it tasted like papiér maché. I salted; I added parmesan; heck, at that point, I would have added prayer if I thought it would have helped, but to no avail; the dish is just inedible.

So, imagine my amazement when I read this claim on Michelina’s Canadian website! I don’t actually believe that Canadians (despite the whole Curling thing) are a different species than Americans, but this has me scratching my head. Is it that the version of this product produced in Canada by Canadian manufacturers is better than its American counterpart? Do Canadians just have lowered expectations, and hence are less disappointed with the end product? Or is this some nefarious marketing ploy by rogue Michelina’s marketing people – a fake poll?

I have Canadian friends, and I don’t believe for one minute that they would vote for this particular dish, therefore I suspect the latter. Oh, Canada…..don’t be misled by fake pollsters!!

This specific dish gets the Icebox Diner’s Hazardous Waste award for inedibility above and beyond the usual.





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