[Image: kfc.co.jp]

This week on February 7, KFC Japan is granting you the joy of eating boneless fried chicken and ketchup-flavored rice without utensils by releasing the Kentucky Chicken Rice, a bun-less sandwich with a patty of ketchup rice, a slice of cheddar cheese, tomato sauce, and special mayonnaise stuffed between two fried chicken fillets. The sandwich clocks in at 585 calories and will set you back ¥450 (about $4.85).

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

In 2010, KFC released a similarly bun-less sandwich, the KFC Double Down made with two slices of cheese (Monterey and Pepper Jack), two slices of bacon, and "Colonel's Sauce" between two fried or grilled chicken fillets.

If any Serious Eaters in Japan try this thing, let us know how it is.

[via Foodbeast, Inventorspot]

[Photographs: Will Gordon]

I like fast food and I should eat it more often. The problem is I work from home and there are no fast food joints in my neighborhood, so it's never my easiest lunch option. Lately I've noticed that I pretty much only eat fast food the one time a week this job requires. Sometimes the boss barks assignments between mouthfuls of oatmeal and whiskey, but for the most part my inspiration comes from television commercials.

I'm looking for new and interesting fast foodstuffs to write about, so I don't pay much mind to the inedible elements of the ads. Or so I tell myself. Who knows how many times I've been sucked into trying yet another crispy chicken something something just because the ad featured a cute dog and/or dog-walker. But I do know that Taco Bell doesn't get a lot of coverage in this column, and while I think it's mostly because their alleged innovations tend to really be repackagings, it could also be at least partially because I'm turned off by their predominant marketing angle.

Simply put, I find Taco Bell ads too aggressive (and often aggressively stupid). I'm not an exxxtreme bro looking to break all the rules. I'm just a regular old hit-or-miss guy looking for lunch on the sloppy side. You got anything for that, Taco Bell? Or are chalupas fit only for more radical lifestyles? Have you nothing Grilled and Stuft for the desk-bound set? And when Taco Bell's not judging me for being a sedentary conformist, they're mocking their customers for being slobs: Their secondary move, after challenging the potential customer's manhood, is to point out that hey, we're all gonna die someday, might as well die fat, screw it, come eat a Fourth Meal.

I don't know how Taco Bell decided it represents the anarchic edge of fast food. My mother, a cautious woman who wouldn't let us watch Murder, She Wrote and enforced a 7 p.m. bedtime until midway through my sophomore year of college, made tacos every week. Taco Bell food isn't appreciably more barbaric than the competition's; I wish they'd accept that as a compliment rather than an accusation of insufficient Neanderthality.

All right, that's off my chest and now let's see what's on my tray. Oh lookie here, a trio of Taco Bell Loaded Grillers, the new 99-cent wraps inspired by casual restaurant appetizers and lauded on the small screen for their ability to foster antisocial behavior. (They're inconvenient to share, you see: "Wings, skins, or nachos for one.") Loaded Grillers come in Spicy Chicken, Beefy Nacho, and Loaded Potato* format, and they're mostly all right. Let's break 'em down.

*So the potato one's double loaded? Shouldn't it be like Ass-Kickin' Mountain-Climbin' Potato? Or at least Cheesy Potato?

Spicy Buffalo Chicken: The moist, tender chicken was much better than I expected from a 99-cent fast food item. Alas, it was overwhelmed by too much of a white goop that purported to be reduced-fat sour cream but tasted like lemony mayonnaise. The "lava" sauce was only mildly spicy, but it wasn't bad, and the Spicy Buffalo Chicken Griller could have used more of it. The problem here was primarily in the design: The tortilla seemed too big for the job, which made the sandwich taste predominantly like wheat and sauce. For the price, you can't ask for more chicken, but you can ask for a wrap better proportioned for the task.

Beefy Nacho: The red tortilla chips were a thoughtful addition that provided a great textural contrast to the beef paste, which tasted nice and peppery but was ground so fine it seemed born of a can rather than a cow; it reminded me of beef-flavored refried beans. There was, of course, pump-action nacho cheese. Like its Spicy Buffalo partner in Loadedness, the Beefy Nacho rendition was either understuffed or overwrapped, but it was still 99 cents well spent, as it managed to somehow be far spicier and more flavorful than the parts would have suggested.

Loaded Potato: This was my favorite, but it won't be yours unless you share my unlikely fondness for Taco Bell's Fiesta Potatoes, curiously sweet home fries that taste like they were dusted with Hostess Powdered Donettes sugar. The bacon bits were flabby and rubbery; they seemed underdone and pepperoni-like in both texture (unfortunate) and spicy flavor (fortunate). The nacho cheese sauce was mild and bland and just fine, the sour cream was judiciously applied and tasted less tainted than the goop in the Buffalo Chicken (different condiment gun?), and the flavors all melded together nicely.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life, particularly the parts of life that involve bourbon and Totino's Pizza Rolls. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him @WillGordonAgain.

[Photographs: Will Gordon]

I'm trying to drop a couple pounds before reporting to spring training, because I've found that the less-young I get, the less-easy it gets to flip the sexiness switch when the clocks finally get their act back together in March. I love Daylight Saving Time, but the one downside is that it provides enough light for people to notice if you've spent the better part of the winter drinking melted butter and eating donut-covered donuts.

So every year about this time I set off on some harebrained, homemade diet plan or another; the details vary, but I always start my days with grandiose and unsustainable ambition that has me basically skipping breakfast and tiptoeing around lunch before the combination of malnourished delirium and my true colors team up for a 2,400-calorie late-afternoon snack featuring at least three meats, four cheeses, and five artificial sweeteners. Not effective.

This year I've finally decided to eat like a reasonable human being throughout the day, which means yay! I get to have breakfast but boo! the breakfast foods I favor tend to have pronounced ass-widening effects. Thus, I must dip my chubby toes into the treacherous waters of calorie-discounted renditions of normal food.

The new Dunkin Donuts Turkey Sausage Breakfast Sandwich appeals to my glutton-on-a-diet sensibilities on multiple fronts. For starters, I've long since made peace with turkey sausage as an acceptable facsimile of the better, porkier version. Once you start grinding, spicing, and encasing your meats, you're already dealing in trickery and compromise, so what's the harm in replacing your pork with turkey? Well, there's the small harm caused by turkey not tasting as good as pork, of course, but today's meat engineers do a good job of addressing the structural and textural issues that were the true scourges of yesteryear's nonpork sausages.

I also like the idea of a breakfast sandwich on an English muffin base. Modern monster bagels have a meal's worth of calories all by themselves, croissants are basically flakey baked fat, and fast food biscuits are rarely any good. English muffins aren't too exciting, but a good one can do an adequate job of supporting a sandwich without doing too much nutritional damage.

The DD Turkey Sausage Breakfast Sandwich ($3.59, 390 calories) gets off to a good start by using a pretty fair muffin. It lacks the cragginess of the genre's elite, but it's far superior to the reshaped white bread I've come to know and tolerate at motel breakfast buffets. It's firm without being overly dense and gets just a bit soggy where it meets the egg.

The whole egg is curiously large and fluffy, implying some sort of frozen-and-microwaved batter with a yolk-shaped yellow patch dropped in the middle, and the assertive fake-butter taste is actually a sad step down from the flavorless egg I've come to expect from Dunkin'. The egg is also studded with curious dark-green flecks of who-knows-what that impart no discernible flavor or texture. I thought my sandwich had come into accidental contact with them until I noticed the same flecks on the marketing photos, which suggests they're supposed to invoke health and vitality, what with their being kinda green and not fried meat.

A breakfast sandwich is made or broken by its meat, and the turkey sausage here is just good enough to make this meat muffin worth your while. It's not exceptional in any way, but the thin patty is less rubbery than expected, and it has a peppery and definitively meaty flavor. It's not the taste of high-class meat, to be sure, but it tastes more like an animal than it does like a lab project, which is an uncommon achievement at this level of dining.

The Dunkin Donuts Turkey Sausage Breakfast Sandwich is moderately tasty, and while it isn't exactly health food, the 390 calories left me feeling satisfied, and it's just nutritious enough that eating one doesn't flush the day's dieting down the drain before lunch.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life, particularly the parts of life that involve bourbon and Totino's Pizza Rolls. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him @WillGordonAgain.

[Photograph: Burger King]

As a fast food reviewer—and as a lunch eater—I generally avoid return visits to a poisoned well. It's tempting to periodically update the same class of bad jokes about the same class of bad food, since indignation is much easier to harness than appreciation, but doing so is generally a waste of everyone's time. I know I'm occasionally guilty of this indulgence (Fieri has some new frozen bullshit* that I'll likely mock to an approving choir of Guy-bashers in the upcoming weeks), so when I looked back through the 2012 fast food review archive, I was pleased to note that I'd resisted the urge to hate-eat anything at Subway. I don't like Subway sandwiches, none of them, ever, which makes them very tempting to write about. But they deserve a fair hearing, so someone else needs to cover them.

* I haven't tried it yet, but it's probably bullshit, and aren't we all going to be disappointed if it's not?

See, I'm fair. And I try to live an examined and sedentary life, which reduces my chance of making egregious mistakes. But, like all honest sinners, I have regrets. And while there's nothing I can do about the checkerboard pattern carved into the side of my head in my 8th-grade class picture, I can address the other major mistake that leaps immediately to mind: I was too hard on Burger King in the recent Worst Fast Food of 2012 post, and it's time to give the King a shot at redemption.

I don't regret saying those particular Burger King items sucked, because those particular Burger King items sucked, but in retrospect I wish I'd fleshed the list out with more awful things from other restaurants so it didn't feature such a high concentration of BK mishaps. Furthermore, I should have included Burger King's bacon sundae and sweet potato fries on the corresponding Best Fast Food of 2012 list. I swear I meant no disrespect to the King. Which brings us to the new Burger King Philly Original Chicken Sandwich.

[Photograph: Burger King]

Man oh man would I love to make some vulgar and ill-informed (but hilarious!) dumbcracks about exactly what one does to a sandwich to make it Philadelphian, but because I enjoyed my one brief visit to Philadelphia and because the theme of this column is rising above my cheap and nasty instincts, I'll let the BK marketing department explain instead. They describe the Philly Original Chicken as "a lightly-breaded chicken fillet topped with traditional Philly-Style toppings—a colorful mix of bell peppers and seasoned grilled onions, served with American cheese and smothered with a creamy cheese sauce. All served hot on a toasted sesame bun." Hmm, I've only been to Philadelphia the once, yet I'd swear that through the years I've eaten peppers, onions, and cheese together at least twice, and probably even thrice.

[Photograph: Will Gordon]

So all right, the name's a little silly, but that hardly matters if the eating's up to snuff. I was optimistic when I unwrapped my Philly Chicken, because I like oblong sandwiches and I adore sesame seed buns. The situation still looked promising after I opened the hatch: the red and green pepper bits had surprisingly good color, and there was a borderline intimidating load of cheese covering a dark-fried, dry-looking chicken patty. I don't mind fast food chicken that's a bit on the dry side, which I find preferable to the greasy side, especially when, as in this case, the parched bird is juiced along by gooey condiments.

[Photograph: Will Gordon]

The two slices of unmelted yellow American cheese didn't do much, but the Whiz-y stuff came through with actual dairy-resemblant flavor in addition to performing its primary task of moisturizing the dry chicken and off-dry bun. The veggies didn't taste as good as they looked, but I tricked myself into noticing a difference between the red and green pepper bits, so that's something. (I pretended the red were sweeter; I suggest you do the same.)

[Photograph: Will Gordon]

The chicken was downright crunchy, which turns me on but may turn you otherwise, for this was not the crunch of a crisp exterior encasing tender, moist chicken. This was a flat, dry patty (with a curious divot in the center) wearing a dull, dry coat. The breading carried a lot of salt and a little bit of pepper, which would have been sufficient in a snazzier sandwich, but I found the Philly Original Chicken to be uncommonly bland. It wasn't bad, because none of the individual components were, but it wasn't particularly good either. If you're a sucker for liquid cheese and geographic nostalgia, the Philly Original Chicken Sandwich will do you fine, but it won't be making any year-end lists.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life, particularly the parts of life that involve bourbon and Totino's Pizza Rolls. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him @WillGordonAgain.

VIEW SLIDESHOW: The Worst Fast Food of 2012

When the boss lady suggested breaking the year-end fast food roundup into separate posts dedicated to the best and worst things we encountered in 2012, I was skeptical, because I have so many fond memories of the year's fast food bounty. But then I looked through the archives and, yeah, we hated a lot of stuff too.

Some of the losers made this list due to overambitious or ill-conceived fixings mixing and condiment matching, while others just plain old sucked. Much as it pains me to bite the industry that feeds me, duty compels me to point out the food that needs avoiding.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

VIEW SLIDESHOW: The Best Fast Food of 2012

It was an up and down year for the fast food industry. Anecdotal evidence suggested that prices rose--the $5 fast food sandwich is now commonplace--while service standards declined, but at least they eased up a bit on trying to cram healthy alternatives down our gullets. Here are some of the bright spots in an uneven year, featuring lots of chicken and more oatmeal than you might expect (which is to say, some oatmeal).

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

My very small and mostly new family is woefully short on holiday traditions. We've made a mighty festive go of it over the past month, thanks primarily to the yule log channel and cranberry bitters, but simply upping our intake of Christmas carols and Santa-hattans hasn't quite filled the bill.

Oh, we've gone to a couple different Nutcrackers, eaten a few tree-shaped cookies, and worn more red than usual—to the naked eye, it may appear as if we've got the holiday acknowledgment game covered. But something's been missing, and I've finally realized that something is seasonally specific celebratory pork.

In a just world in which I had a properly arranged marriage, this would be a big pink Christmas ham. But the fates instead lashed me to an otherwise lovely woman who doesn't like ham. That's right. Doesn't like ham. No, not for any ethical or religious reasons. My beloved lunatic has simply made the independent decision to dislike this land's greatest meat bounty.

I like pork in all its many glorious incarnations and my wife approves of a few, so I can probably slide some kind heavily compromised tenderloin across the holiday table without much fuss. But I do that all the time, so while it will make for a fine meal, it won't make for a special one.

It turns out I have only one reasonable and convenient option for a festive year-end pork tradition: Yup, the McRib's back again. You'll find it nationwide at participating McDonald's through December.

As long as McDonald's keeps riling up the fast food masses with an annual reissue of the industry's only meaningful non-breakfast, pork-based sandwich, I'll keep writing about it. And every year the intro about my personal life will get longer, because every year I'll have less to say about the fairly mundane McRib.

Don't get me wrong—it's a pretty good sandwich. But its following is derived largely from its manipulated scarcity and its utter lack of competition. I'm not so certain the McRib would inspire anywhere near the same devotion in a more crowded fast food porkscape. But alas, it doesn't have to. All any champion needs to do is beat the field. If there is no field, the champ just has to be better than nothing, and eating a McRib is an emphatically more pleasurable experience than eating no pork sandwich at all.

The McRib doesn't have a particularly porky flavor, which is more of a conceptual problem than a practical one. It tastes like a heavily sauced chicken-or-whatever patty with raw onions and oversalted pickles. This half-assed approach actually works, though, because the sauce is among the best in the fast food business, despite being little more than sugary ketchup with very little depth or spice. McRib sauce has just enough vinegar to suggest a departure from the stuff they put on base model hamburgers, which is all the very forgiving population of McRib diehards require.

We just want McDonald's to help us along in the happy delusion that we're eating something unique. McRibs aren't great, but they're good enough to appease this tradition-seeker.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

[Photographs: Will Gordon]

I speak often of my excellence as a soup-maker, and for good reason: I'm a delusional braggart. I also make a lot of soup, some of it good, some of it not, and most of it suffering from a classic and confounding soup-stew identity crisis.

The only fully smooth soups I make are lentil-based, because whole lentils are creepy; every other wet meal born on my stovetop features a varying percentage of solid matter, sometimes enough to qualify as stew (unless it contains hot pepper and beans other than garbanzo, in which case I call it chili). For years I've wasted precious energy trying to establish a comprehensive spoon-food taxonomy, energy that would have been better spent simmering and pureeing and remembering to fish out bay leaves.

Well, no more. It's high time I put an end to the infernal soup-stew debate once and for all by declaring that for the rest of my life, or at least for the rest of this article, the words "soup" and "stew" will be used capriciously and interchangeably. Since we're dealing with beef-based products today, I will err heavily on the side of stew, because "beef soup" sounds repulsive.

My original mission was to see if the genre's standard bearer, Dinty Moore Beef Stew, is as good as I remembered it being from my teenhood. But I needed something other than my memories to compare it to, and I rarely cook with beef myself, so the most reasonable option was to find it some shelf-stable competition. This proved slightly more complicated than I'd anticipated, because it turns out that the grocery store is filthy with cans that are almost, but not quite, based on the Dinty Moore model.

Both Progresso and Campbell's Chunky make several soups featuring slightly varied combinations of beef, vegetables, and adjectives. I picked the two that most closely approximated the venerable Dinty Moore formula of beef, carrots, and potatoes: Progresso Rich and Hearty Steak and Roasted Russet Potatoes and Campbell's Chunky Beef with Country Vegetables.

From left: Dinty Moore, Progresso, Chunky.

The three stews were of vastly different thicknesses. The Dinty Moore had so little liquid that it splorted out of the can with an unsavory dog-food noise. Progresso was at the other end of the spectrum, with so much broth that it was possible (though unlikely) to scoop up a solid-free spoonful. If I believed in calling anything beef soup, I would call the Progresso beef soup. Campbell's Chunky most closely toed the imaginary line separating stew and soup.

Dinty Moore

($2.15 for 15 ounces; 200 calories, 10 grams of fat, 10 grams of protein, and 990 milligrams of sodium per 1-cup serving)

The sentimental favorite from Hormel was almost brothless straight out of the can, but once heated on the stovetop a light but sufficient dose of liquid emerged. The broth is starkly salty, with undertones of beef, tomato water, and carrot. The egregiously mushy carrot rounds themselves are almost devoid of flavor. Fortunately, potato chunks outnumber carrots by about three to one; the potatoes are firm by any definition and flavorful as canned potatoes go. Toothsome taters are all well and good, but in the end it brings me no pleasure to report that the Dinty Moore beef was terrible. Large, irregular hunks of grainy, bland, crumbly beef resembled shoddily designed Salisbury steak and left me hating my tongue and doubting my past.

Progresso Rich and Hearty Steak and Roasted Russet Potatoes

($2.50 for 18.5 ounces; 130 calories, 2 grams of fat, 8 grams of protein, and 690 milligrams of sodium per 1-cup serving)

The broth tasted pleasantly of canned gravy, with light onion and garlic powder complementing the beef stock, but the texture was a bit too slick for comfort. The diced carrots were even worse than Dinty Moore's, and the unpeeled potatoes were acceptable but also inferior to the competition; they had a firm but false texture that invoked reconstituted potato flakes. The small pieces of smoky, jerky-tasting beef were few and far between, and they were marred by a crumbly texture reminiscent of soy-based ground beef substitute.

Campbell's Chunky Beef with Country Vegetables

($3 for 18.8 ounces; 120 calories, 3 grams of fat, 7 grams of protein, and 860 milligrams of sodium per 1-cup serving)

This had the best broth by far, with some borderline fresh notes of tomato and celery amid the beef. Chunky was also the only stew in the lineup to make a decent go of the carrots. They're not laughably squishy (though far from firm) and they retain a bit of their original flavor, which is good since this is the only entrant to boast more carrots than potatoes. The potatoes felt good but tasted like nothing at all. Chunky was the only one to deviate by from the beef-potato-carrot plan, with the inclusion of predictably terrible peas and a few stray bits of inconsequential celery.

The Winner?

Bold veggie gambits aside, Campbell's Chunky Beef with Country Vegetables was my favorite because of its superior beef, tiny quater-inch cubes that exhibited the welcome flavor and texture of real, honest-to-goodness steak.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

One of the dirty open secrets of the fast food racket is that a lot of alleged menu innovation owes more to marketing and packaging than to the introduction of all-new items. When the advertisers sing at us about a new fast food item, the best we can generally hope for is a meaningful reconfiguration of an existing item. This is reasonable when you consider the limitations of the genre. There are only so many meals that can be cost-effectively prepared in 90 seconds or less by an ever-changing minimum-wage staff.

So we don't expect fast food chains to regularly reinvent the wheel, but we can't help but feel a little cheated when they merely slather a different sauce on the same old wheel and call it progress. Taco Bell is the grandmaster of tweaking the same few ingredients into an ever-changing menu of old things with news names; sometimes they advance the cause by sprinkling Doritos dust on a previously Doritos-free surface, but their standard trick is to simply remove a couple stitches from a tortilla, wait for the burrito to flop open, and call it a taco.

KFC (Taco Bell's chickencentric Yum! Brands stablemate) has developed a couple of honest-to-goodness new products in recent years—2010's eXXXtreme food gimmick, the Double Down, and this year's excellent Chunky Chicken Pot Pie—but they've also dipped their beak into the rebranding pool by calling the old Snacker the new Chicken Little. So what's up with the Dip'ems they've been pushing lately? Anything new, protein-wise, or just another name for the same old sauce-delivery system?

The latter. I was hoping that Dip'ems would at least be reshaped chicken chunks, a la Popeye's scoop-molded Dip'n Chick'n, but an order of Dip'Ems is just three Extra Crispy Strips with a couple of new sauce options. The $5 Dip'Em Combo is supposed to get you three pieces of chicken, a biscuit, one side, two tubs of sauce, and a drink. (I got an extra strip for no discernible reason and two extra sauces because I asked if I could try everything they had.)

I've seen reports of Bacon Ranch and Orange Ginger sauces, but my KFC only had Honey BBQ, Creamy Ranch, Creamy Buffalo, and Honey Mustard, with Creamy Ranch serving as the default dip. I wish I could tell you about the Bacon Ranch and Orange Ginger, but per a recurring theme in recent fast food reviews, I can only write about what they're willing to sell me, which isn't always what they promise in the ads.

Though in no way novel, the crunchy, flavorful chicken was better than I've come to expect from KFC chicken, and I tend to like the Colonel's work more than a lot of my peers do. These Dip/Strips were hot and fresh, which is most of the battle in the fried chicken game. The seasoning was a little bit off, though, with too much salt and not enough pepper. Still, good chicken. Now what about the sauce?

From left: Honey BBQ, Creamy Buffalo, Honey Mustard, Creamy Ranch

The Honey BBQ is sweet and boring, attributes that are fine for a second-choice prom date but unfit for a beacon-of-hope sauce in a lineup disconcertingly reliant on the word "creamy." The Honey BBQ let me down by being far too sugary, with no tang and only the slimmest glimmer of smoke.

Next up was the Creamy Buffalo, which lists "red cayenne pepper mash" as the first ingredient; setting aside all the horrors that could be hidden in the word "mash," that's an encouraging start to a fast food dipping sauce. This sauce is very hot for the genre and serves as a reasonable facsimile of the traditional sports bar version. It's got noticeable vinegar bite along with the cayenne, and the mayo element somehow manages to taste like butter.

The Honey Mustard broke my heart by being more like honey mayo. The alleged Dijon is barely detectable, offering cursory sharpness to an otherwise over-sweetened dipwreck. The Creamy Ranch sucks too: It's basically mayonnaise with buttermilk, and the flecks of green did nothing but make me nervous.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

When I found out about Whole Foods' new frozen foods, I looked over the dozens-long list and decided to try the four Whole Foods Market Asian Skillet Meals: Sweet and Sour Chicken, Orange Chicken, General Tso's Chicken, and Beef and Broccoli ($4.99 each).

Each Asian Skillet Meal encourages us to "Put away your passport! While we know you don't have to travel to the Far East to enjoy this popular stir-fried combination, with this favorite fusion on-hand, you won't even need your car keys," which doesn't work. If you can't commit to the passport conceit, then you've got to scrap the whole idea and start over. This likely started off with "Put away your passport, because Whole Foods has eliminated the need for General Tso's-based international travel!" but then someone pointed out that you don't use a passport to eat General Tso's; you just go to the Chinese takeout place. So the first guy said, "Ohhh, right. Well, how about we put away the car keys too?" and the other guy wasn't paying enough attention to shout, "DELIVERY. START OVER."

Whole Foods could have positioned these as a healthier alternative to takeout—each 16-ounce pouch contains an alleged 3 servings at an average of about 150 calories and 5-7 grams each of fat, protein, and sugar, with varied but less-than-you'd think amounts of sodium and cholesterol. However, the only way to get two (let alone three) normal human meals out of these is to slide some rice underneath, which you might as well do since you're already messing with the stovetop due to the other marketing angle, the skillet preparation method.

Skillets are for cooking, not for reheating. This seems designed to make guilty "cooks" feel like they're actually "cooking," a la boxed cake mixes engineered to call for a single egg. But I'm not in charge here, I just do what I'm told, so I skilleted each of these babies for the prescribed 7-9 minutes over medium heat.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Battered chicken reheated in sauce on the stovetop can't help but be soggy, but it does taste pretty good. The pepper and onion chunks are sweet, and the pepper retains some slight snap. The pineapple looks and tastes a little bit like underripe mango, but the texture holds up surprisingly well. The bright-red bits of tomato are mostly skin that add nothing but color. The sauce leans quite decidedly to the sweet, but it's an honest fruit-based sweetness.

Orange Chicken

This time the same battered chicken is joined by thin-sliced carrots, water chestnuts, edamame, and a spicy, tangy orange sauce. Carrots are often tossed into frozen dinners simply for show, but here they retain admirable texture and flavor. The edamame is flavorless but snappy; the water chestnuts are a fully crunchy delight. This is more successful than the Sweet and Sour Chicken thanks to the stronger vegetables and more pungent sauce.

General Tso's Chicken

That chicken's back again, this time with a cornstarchy liquid that's heavy on the soy sauce and ginger, with lesser doses of garlic and oyster sauce. The dish worked well because the broccoli held up much better than I expected. It was a little squishy up top but the stalks were firm.

Beef and Broccoli

The well balanced oyster, garlic, and ginger sauce was my favorite of the bunch. The sweet and tender beef is very good, and thicker than I'm accustomed to from takeout. The broccoli here wasn't as good as in the General Tso's—maybe I let it get trapped on the bottom of the pan for too long—but it still showed more spine than most frozen broccoli.

If you don't want to clear customs, burn gas, or tip the delivery guy—and you don't mind standing at the stovetop for frozen food—Whole Foods Markets Asian Skillet Meals are a fine option. Comparisons will vary based on how good your local takeout place is, but these are just as good as most of the stuff that comes to my door.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

Every now and then someone will try to convince us that the Internet is making the world a stupider place. Most of these claims come from morons or paper farmers, but some of them come from otherwise intelligent folk indulging a contrarian-for-the-hell-of-it streak. I confess to having such a streak my own thick self (I don't really hate the Beatles; I'm just a little burned out), but I can no longer indulge anyone who denies that the Internet makes me smarter every day.

Today's little jolt of genius resulted from trying to figure out how to categorize the chains of inexpensive quick-serve restaurants that are better than fast food but lack waiters and (usually) liquor licenses. They are called "fast casual," a very pleasing term that led me to the great fast casual.com—I now know ¾ of everything about this kind of establishment. I'll wait here while you catch up.

Cosi has long been my favorite fast casual chain, but that's mostly by default. My few memories of Cosi are positive, my experiences at Panera have been negative, and I don't get out much otherwise. Cosi's not huge yet—150 or so domestic locations in 16 states and one District—but it's marched steadily along since its founding in 1996, and now there's one a couple miles from my house.

If you put cranberries in a thing, I'll eat it. If you call a thing "chili," I'll eat it. So if you offer a seasonal Steak and Cranberry Chili, I'm doubly certain to swing by for an inspection, and if it's any good I might be disinclined to leave. Let's cliff-hang for a second before reading on to find out if I now live at the Cosi in Kendall Square.

Permanent Cosi domicile proved impossible due to domestic concerns and health regulations, but if it were a strictly chili-based decision—why oh why can't more decisions be strictly chili-based?—I'd definitely consider it. Cosi didn't invent the brilliant concept of adding whole, real, tartness-retaining cranberries to beef and bean chili, but theirs was the first version I've tried, and I could live happily in a world where it's the best available.

A large (15-ounce) order of chili and a hunk of very good wheat bread set me back a modest $5.99. The chili was substantial for the price and also for the nutrition stats: This is a very tasty way to trade 381 low-fat calories for 22 grams of protein and 7 grams of fiber. Does this mean the chili was a little steak-shy? Well sure, but that's OK. There were plenty of tiny cubes of good lean beef swimming among the kidney beans, cranberries, and company.

The beans were fairly firm and intact (unlike the exploded ones in the justifiably popular Wendy's chili), which is good since they were the major support staff: The diced tomato was scarce and the scallions did what they do, i.e., added some color to a bowl of brown. The chili would have benefitted from more onion or at least onion powder. The broth was silky and good, if a bit heavy on the thickener. It was very lightly seasoned, with just a light dose of garlic powder and hot pepper coming through.

This would have been a problem in a less ambitious chili, but in this case it came across as a magnanimous concession to the cranberries, which were perfect—when they showed up. They tasted like proper berries should, but there was one downside to going the honest route rather than just making a chili cosmo full of sweetened jellies or juices: There was scarcely any cranberry flavor in the roughly half of my spoonfuls that didn't contain any actual berries.

But it's hard to get too worked up over any flaw that can be corrected by simply taking bigger bites. Cosi's Steak and Cranberry Chili is one of the best $6 meals I've had all year.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

For decades we've been beaten over the head with the mantra "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." I've never quite bought into this, because it works better in theory than in practice. I don't dispute the importance of eating something in between the end of sleep and the beginning of toil; I'm not a nutritionist, but the logic seems clear. The reason I worry about the breakfast-or-bust indoctrination is that the breakfast zealots often neglect to mention that it matters what you eat, not just that you eat.

Next time you're chatting up a friendly stranger in a bar or an elevator and the talk turns to breakfast, casually mention that some days you just don't feel like eating until lunch. Your new enemy's eyes will go wide and his throat will go hoarse as he excoriates you for neglecting our most universally agreed upon lifestyle truism. Tell the same guy you like to start the day with an elaborate feast of human entrails and he'll respond, "Sure, need your morning protein. Don't forget the appendix. Useless in a living body but essential in a stir-fry."

Don't get me wrong. I love breakfast, what with it being a meal and all, but I just think we should follow one simple ground rule before declaring dietary victory every morning that we remember to shovel some food in with the coffee. For your breakfast to live up to its true potential, it needs to be either substantially healthy for the body or exceedingly pleasing to the soul. Either carrot juice and a banana or a 4-egg, 3-meat, 2-beer omelet, for instance. I don't care which circle you fill in, just make sure it's one or the other. Don't half-ass it down the middle with a bodega bagel or a Special K bar.

My favorite breakfast on mornings when I opt to let my corporeal heart fend for itself while I feed its metaphorical counterpart is the sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich. I'll take my cholesterol on whatever bread's handy—English muffin, bagel, fistful of saltines—but I prefer biscuits. Fast food places and coffee shops have nearly perfected this art, but sometimes I need to soothe my soul before I can bear to wear my pants, so last week I headed for the frozen food section in search of a reasonable home-based version of the sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit.

There are fewer options than I'd expected. Jimmy Dean and Aunt Jemima were the only two major national brands I could find with the good sense to explore the frozen sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit market. OK then, it's a head-to-head battle to see who, if anyone, gets to stock my freezer full of good-bad-decision breakfast treats.

Both brands cost a bit more than a buck a biscuit: $4.99 gets you a 4-pack of Jimmy Dean, and $2.50 brings a pair of Aunt Jemima. Jimmy Deans offering is a smudge bigger—4.5 ounces each to Auntie J's 4.1 ounces—but they're basically different versions of the same food: cheap, greasy breakfast sandwiches consisting of a sausage patty, an egg disk, and a slice of cheese in the middle of a biscuit. They're both nutritional train wrecks, but that inconvenient fact aside, they sound pretty promising, no?

From left: Jimmy Dean; Aunt Jemima.

Aunt Jemima (shown at right) emerged from the microwave looking a little sharper than Jimmy Dean due to superior biscuit topography. Crags are supposed to taste good, aren't they? In fact, both top biscuits tasted the same, like plain white bread, with the Dean losing points for being a little too dense and also a little too little in relation to the ingredients entrusted into its care. But Aunt Jemima surrendered the biscuit lead with a tragically hard bottom biscuit, whereas the mediocre top layer of Jimmy Dean's at least didn't get any worse down below.

From left: Jimmy Dean; Aunt Jemima.

The cheese was basically the same, with both slices lacking style and the Aunt Jemima also lacking substance: Jemima mailed in the same half-size effort you find on a Filet-O-Fish. Jimmy Dean cheese won by default—it wasn't very good, but at least it bothered to put in a full biscuit's worth of work. Aunt Jemima delivered a better egg puck; Jimmy Dean's was ultraspongy and totally devoid of yolk character, whereas Aunt Jemima's had a similarly disconcerting texture but at least had the decency to taste like an egg.

From left: Jimmy Dean; Aunt Jemima.

The Jimmy Dean sandwich had far better sausage. The texture was on the squishy side of reasonable but it tasted better than fine, with a nice pepper kick accenting the porkiness. Aunt Jemima's sausage (also pork) tasted better than it looks, but everything tastes better than that sausage looks. It was the blander of the two patties, with no distinguishing pig characteristics, but the texture was the real crime. It felt like neoprene, a delightful material for a beer koozie but not for the headline ingredient in a solace-seeker's breakfast sandwich.

Although these breakfast biscuits weren't as good as I'd hoped, I recommend stashing a box of Jimmy Dean's in the back of the freezer for those mornings when a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit is the only way to fill the void in your stomach or your soul.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

[Photograph: D'Angelo's]

I used to call Thanksgiving an overrated holiday, because I used to be a contrarian twerp in desperate need of a canned-gravy waterboarding. Lucky for me, I came to my senses before any advanced persuasion techniques were applied, and I now freely admit it is impossible to overrate a five-day weekend built around football and gluttony. Thanksgiving is the best!

Thanksgiving food, however, doesn't live up to the hype. It's fantastic in that there's loads of it, but I still maintain the actual food items lack some of the luster we ascribe to them.

Raise your hand if your favorite pie is pumpkin. Now use your other hand to pinch yourself for being a dirty rotten liar. If pumpkin pie were so special, we'd eat it year round, or at least more often than we do. Same goes for the centerpiece: turkey is cheap, plentiful, nutritious, and easy to cook (step back, briners, fryers, 'duckeners, and spatchcockers: I'm referring to the way most people cook turkey, i.e., pop it in the oven for half a day, hope for the best, and settle for the good-enough). So why don't we cook turkey in March? Because we don't really love it as much as we pretend to.

The most damning evidence against the traditional Thanksgiving meal is the popularity of the leftovers. We like the full spread on Thursday primarily because it's so easily repurposed between a couple slices of bread Friday through Tuesday. Essentially, we prize Thanksgiving food for its thereness.

In recent years, sandwich shops across the land have capitalized on our faith in Pilgrim food to push all manner of Thanksgiving sandwiches on us. The logic is solid: We eat plenty of turkey sandwiches year round, because that's what turkey's good for. It makes for a benign condiment holder during a fast, cheap lunch. Then you factor in that most people like stuffing and cranberry sauce, and gravy improves all foods that cross its path, and voila, a seasonal premium sandwich is born.

I tried the Panera version last month and good golly was that a disaster. (Aside to those familiar with that sad song: Panera headquarters got wind of the situation, apologized, and offered a gift card. I declined the gift card but will give the chain another go once the initial trauma fades.) But for all my kvetching, I love a good leftovers sandwich more the next guy, so I was happy to try the D'Angelo Thanksgiving Toasted.

D'Angelo is a chain of 155 sandwich shops scattered throughout New England. It was founded in 1967 in a Boston suburb, and it almost went national in the early 1990s after being acquired by the Pepsi/KFC/Taco Bell beast, but by 1999 it had been sold to New England pizza chain Papa Gino's and has since embraced its role as regional star. D'Angelo remains strong because it specializes in steak, which helps it from being subsumed by Subway, as most discerning palates agree that steak tastes better from the griddle than from the microwave.

What the actual sandwich looks like. [Photograph: Will Gordon]

For $6.99, I got a medium (8-inch) sub of thick-sliced turkey breast, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and mayonnaise. The bread was well toasted all the way around, not just flash-heated on top as per the fast food norm. It got a little spongy at the point of contact with the fillings, but that's the fault of neither the bread nor the toaster: It was inevitable given the preponderance of cranberry jelly, mayo, and wetter-than-ideal stuffing.

The turkey was generous and fine, though a bit tough and stringy and also the lone cold element in an otherwise warm sandwich. The bread was singed along the split, suggesting a sandwich that had been fully assembled prior to going in the oven on its spine and closing up a bit; since the turkey was in the middle, it was the farthest from the heat. No big deal; the gravy was hot.

The stuffing felt eerily similar to too-loose scrambled eggs, but it was full of flavor. It was herby and peppery and seemed to have been simmered in chicken broth. The cranberry sauce was uncommonly mindful of the fact that cranberries aren't born sweet, with a real-food tartness coming over the top of the added sugar. The side of gravy was hot (rather than warm) and savory, which is all it needed to be. With heavy-handed application of cranberry and mayo, condiments were definitely in the foreground, but that's acceptable in a sandwich whose other components are turkey, bread, and another kind of bread. D'Angelo's Thanksgiving Toasted is very good.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and has made peace with mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

I've been watching too much sports and politics lately, which means I've been overexposed to journalists who repeatedly deny their blatant biases. Reporters who cover games and elections go to great lengths to assure us of their implausible neutrality. The only people I know who don't prefer one team or candidate to the others are the people who simply don't care about sports or politics, and three cheers for those healthy, well adjusted folk, but I don't want them telling me about sports and politics.

This fully accredited, informed, and engaged member of the fast food media is admitting a bias up front: I like Popeyes. In general it's easier to write about crappy food, because there are more clever ways to say "awful" than there are "not bad, pretty decent." But every time I head into Popeyes, I'm rooting for a positive experience on which to report. I have no emotional connection, good or bad, to most chain restaurants, but there are a couple of things about Popeyes that tickle me just right.

I like that it's new to me (I didn't set foot in a Popeyes until I started this gig last year). I like that the founder, Al Copeland, justified a grammatical error on the basis of poverty: He said there's no apostrophe in "Popeyes" because he couldn't afford one. I like that the soda fountain has Strawberry Fanta(!) I like that, their half-hearted Louisiana Leaux line of grilled things barely withstanding, they make little pretense toward healthfulness. And most of all, I simply adore the way Popeyes fries the pants off an animal part.

Popeyes' food quality is by far their strongest attribute, but their quirkiness contributes more than simple charm and novelty. Just as Popeyes is willing to forego empty gestures involving baby spinach and shaved carrots, they also have the courage to feature fried seafood outside the traditional season of Filet-O-religion promotions. Most fast food outlets offer one simple fried fish sandwich that is on the menu year-round and pushed hard during Lent. Popeyes, on the more adventurous hand, now brings us the Crawfish Festival.

Popeyes emphasizes their Louisiana roots at every turn, but it's still pretty bold to offer a nation-wide special on crawfish. It's one thing to sell us northerners a Cajun-rubbed this or a Creole-spiced that—Applebee's has been doing so for decades. But it takes real gumption to offer something that very few fast food patrons eat with anything approaching regularity.

For a limited time, $4.99* will get a thrill- or fish-seeking fast foodie a Crawfish Tackle Box featuring big pile of fried crawfish nuggets, a small batch of Cajun fries, a biscuit, and a tub of Creamy Horseradish Sauce. It's a good deal.

The marble-sized crawfish chunks weren't exactly bursting with flavor; the batter seemed less salted and peppered than on Popeyes' chicken, and there wasn't much aquatic character to the actual meat, which tasted as much like butter as it did like shellfish. But the crawfish's texture was ideal, with a good snap yielding to an almost creamy interior in a way that (perhaps falsely) suggested freshness. And this being Popeyes, they were fried to near perfection. The Creamy Horseradish Sauce was a very pleasant surprise, despite being little more than horsed-up mayo with a little dose of garlic. It was assertive enough to add punch to a somewhat staid situation without overpowering the crawfish.

The fries were peppery and good, with a buttery interior that resembled mashed potatoes in a crunchy shell. The biscuit provided yet more butter and all of the salt that was missing from the crawfish batter. The Strawberry Fanta was delightful. Go get yourself a Crawfish Tackle Box.

*The national ads say $4.99, though I paid $5.99 at the Popeyes in a high-rent part of an expensive city.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and hates mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.

The most surprising thing about my first year as a fast food correspondent is how little time I've spent at McDonald's. I've been focusing mostly on new items, and it seems the chains beneath the market leader feel much more pressure to innovate and adapt. The clown can just keep pumping out Big Macs and McNuggets, whereas the competition is compelled to throw many more burgers at the menu board.

Burger King has been the most aggressive risk-taker lately. Just this past summer they put bacon on ice cream, sweet potatoes in the fryolator, and the kitchen sink atop a Whopper. Now they've rolled out a bunch of new back-to-school sandwiches, highlighted by their take on chicken parm.

Everybody likes a good chicken parmesan sandwich, and an easy-grading mensch like myself even appreciates a mediocre one. Because I set the bar pretty low for this category of bird-on-bread, I was only somewhat pessimistic when I started to hear bad things about BK's whirl. The combination of fried chicken*, tomato sauce, and cheese is so appealing to me that it would take almost willful negligence on the King's part to send me away unsatisfied.

*The sandwich is also available with grilled chicken, but give me a break. Grilled fast food chicken has its place, but we're talking about chicken parm here: Fry it or leave it.

The gray band where the patty hits the batter didn't affect the taste, but still, eww.

The bun was pretty good. Burger King and I have different definitions of "toasted"—the eerie dark dapples on the chicken-side are supposed to suggest proper toasting but are really just the bread version of fake grill marks—but that's all right. The bun was warm, fresh, and medium dense without being overstuffed.

The sauce was a disappointment. What looked like a fair portion applied to both halves of the bun turned out to be insufficient due to a pronounced lack of flavor. It was semi-arid tomato paste with a lot of salt, a little pepper, and no herb character to justify the few flakes of green matter shown in the photo below. Burger King definitely needs to take a page from the pizzeria playbook and err on the sloppy side, since this is the rare case where more of an underwhelming ingredient would help. If there was enough of this bland sauce to make a respectable mess, it would go a long way toward replicating the chicken parm experience that inspired this sandwich in the first place.

The cheese wasn't any good, either. It's a two-toned arrangement dominated by flavorless melted mozzarella. I could see the parmesan shavings underneath the mozzalanche, but I sure couldn't taste them. The cheese layer had a nice texture and ably performed its binding duties, but you can't get away with taste-free cheese when you're already serving bland marinara.

The chicken wasn't good enough to completely right such a raggedy ship, but an excellent fry job combined with reasonable moisture and tenderness salvaged this gentle critic's lunch. I'm a sucker for anything even vaguely reminiscent of a good chicken parm sandwich, but that doesn't prevent me from recognizing the BK Chicken Parm's significant flaws. If you're a die-hard member of the parm army, this will do. But if you're merely a civilian looking for the best way to spend $4.89 and 630 calories, Burger King has better options for you.

About the author: Will Gordon loves life and hates mayonnaise. You can eat and drink with him in Boston or follow him on twitter @WillGordonAgain.