The Lunchables chicken parmesan sandwich

this is dorm cooking at its finest

Hello, clowns!

This week on Food is Stupid, college classes are in session.

Ah, yes, what a time. As a freshman in the dorms, most of the cooking I was capable of doing was only out of a microwave. But these days, dorm life seems like it could potentially be amazing.

That’s because there are now lots of useful compact devices you can use to make food in your sweaty little room, and many different resources out there to teach you how to use them. Take this newsletter, for example, which is written by me, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history.

Inspired by the resourcefulness of the First Ladies of Nebraska, who managed to turn canned and jarred ingredients into some of the most interesting culinary masterpieces I have ever seen, I have decided to find a way to teach young ones how to turn their mini-fridge resources into a gourmet three-star feast.

Now, as you know, real estate in your mini-fridge is valuable. Aside from cans of Monster energy drink and a few stray bottles of beer, it’s important to have compact and useful meals ready for whenever you need them. That is why you should always have resources like Lunchables on hand for emergency situations.

But sometimes, you need to treat yourself to something nice without leaving your own room, which is why today, I’m here to show you how to take three types of Lunchables, do barely any work, and transform them into something that’ll help you clinch an episode of Chopped: Dorm Edition.

So let’s make a Lunchables chicken parmesan sandwich, shall we?

In order to make this delectable Lunchables chicken parmesan sandwich, I’d need to cobble it together from three different boxes.

For the chicken portion, I’d use a Chicken Dunks kit, which features weird chicken nuggets. For the sauce and cheese, I’d repurpose the tomato sauce and cheese shreds from a deep dish pizza kit, and for the bread, I would take the roll out of a ham and cheese submarine sandwich kit.

Then, for extra seasoning, I had an extra tub of butter garlic dipping sauce from Little Caesars on hand, along with a few packets of grated parmesan I ganked from our local slice shop.

I was originally fixated on the idea of using an Easy Bake Oven to create this scrumptious Lunchables chicken parmesan sandwich, but once I saw the price for them online, I actually shit my pants.

On Amazon, the base unit alone costs an eye-watering (in this case pants-filling) $120 dollars. $120? ¿En esta economía?!

The creepy Amazon algorithm gods, who probably track my every single shopping move, listened to my sobs, and suggested I buy this hilarious-looking Dash Mini Toaster Oven for $21. Which I promptly did. At Target. “Eat my ass, Bezos,” I said to the Target employee when I picked it up, who told me to never come back to that location again.

I’m guessing this little guy is meant for people with small kitchens, singles, or college kids in a dorm, which is why it’s designed to only toast one slice of bread at a time. But I wasn’t prepared for how genuinely adorable this thing is. Easy Bake Oven who?

This thing is incredible. The instruction manual says very seriously not to toast any bread for over four minutes, and based off the test slice I put in this thing, Dash is not fucking around. This tiny toaster oven goes from 0 to 100 million degrees almost immediately, and if I hadn’t been standing in front of the thing to turn it off, my bread would have been incinerated, and so would I.

This is not a secretly paid advertisement, by the way. The only people who pay me to write this newsletter is you guys.

I harvested the roll out of the ham and cheese submarine sandwich Lunchables kit in order to get started.

I started by coating the interior of the roll with some of the Little Caesars’ Butter Garlic dipping sauce we had laying around after a wild night.

You see, the most important chefs in the world will tell you that any great dish is built upon layers of flavor. And there’s plenty of flavor in a little cup packed with soybean oil, fully hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, artificial and natural flavors, beta carotene (for color), hydrolyzed soy protein, autolyzed yeast extract, 2% less of salt, artificial and natural flavor, xanthan gum, propylene glycol alginate, with sorbic acid and phosphoric acid (as preservatives, of course), and calcium disodium EDTA (to protect the quality we all know and love from Little Caesars).

I toasted off the sub roll in the new oven and basked in the disturbing amount of heat it was putting out.

In fact, I’m pretty sure this thing gave me a chef’s tan or something.

Once the toasted roll was out and cooling, I opened up the package of Lunchables Chicken Dunks to examine its contents.

This thing came with four weird (presumably) chicken circles, two Oreo knockoffs, and an entire compartment of grainy ketchup, which had a thin layer of water pooled on top of it.

To tell you the truth, I’d never had, nor experienced these chicken rounds before, and though I originally expected something like a Chicken McNugget, I could already tell that’s not entirely what these things were. They were nearly perfect circles with a very unusual density to them that I’ve never seen in a terrestrial object before.

I put a layer of the Chicken Dunks on the teeny tiny baby toaster pan that came with the mini toaster oven, and started drizzling tomato sauce on them.

Once I’d exhausted the sauce packet, I sprinkled the shredded cheese meant for the deep dish Lunchable pizza kit on top.

And of course, you can’t have chicken parmesan without a snatched parmesan packet from the terrible, horrible, pizza place in your neighborhood.

If you’re a college kid, you can get away for asking for extra packets of parmesan to stash away for later. They get it. But it’s not as cute if you’re a 42-year-old guy who takes a handful of them and runs out the door.

I baked the Lunchable Chicken Dunker parmesan off in the toaster oven, which as expected, heated up in no time at all, and took on some color.

I was starting to feel like a regular Michelin-starred asshole Gordon Ramsay, who, by the way, recently released a line of frozen TV dinners, which are exclusively available at Walmart. Hey, if you’ve reached the peak of the mountain, there’s no faster way down than jumping off the summit, you know?

After topping the toasted roll with the Lunchables Chicken Dunker parmesan, I sprinkled some extra stolen parmesan on top, then drizzled some more soybean oil, fully hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, artificial and natural flavors, beta carotene (for color), hydrolyzed soy protein, autolyzed yeast extract, 2% less of salt, artificial and natural flavor, xanthan gum, propylene glycol alginate, with sorbic acid and phosphoric acid (as preservatives, of course), and calcium disodium EDTA (to protect the quality we all know and love from Little Caesars) all over it.

The end product looked pretty cute, if you ask me, in a various-shades-of-brown sort of way.

The gang eyed the sandwich, then stared at me. I never know what those three are thinking. They may have been upset that I used their new time machine unit to make a really childish sandwich.

One new toaster oven, three dismantled Lunchables kits, and two stolen parmesan packets later, I finally took a bite of my Lunchables chicken parmesan sandwich.

Wow. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting this. The sandwich couldn’t have tasted further off from chicken parmesan if I’d fucking tried. That sauce for the deep dish pizza Lunchables was so cloyingly sweet it might as well have been straight corn syrup, and all of the cheese may not as well have even existed, but what really messed me up were the Chicken Dunkers. Specifically, their texture.

I don’t know if you can tell by that photo of the cross-section, but whatever was going on with that chicken was seriously broken. I’m used to chicken nuggets being spongy in some fashion, but the Dunkers had the opposite issue, with nearly no air in them at all. The closest thing I can liken these things to, is the Indian cheese paneer. I mean, it even looked like paneer. Poultry paneer. Kraft Heinz managed to take chicken and transform it into a pencil eraser. I’ve never been so impressed.

Okay, so the sandwich was completely fucked, but this time it wasn’t my fault. The architecture was flawless, but the construction materials were trash. But hey, at least I got a really funny toaster oven out of it. Sorry about screwing you out of that Chopped: Dorm Edition money, kids, I know it was for your college tuition.

But what were you doing trying to get cooking advice from an English major, anyway?

---

All right, everyone—you know the drill: If you liked today’s edition of the newsletter, don’t forget to share it in any fashion you can, via social media, by forwarding it to your entire family, printing it out and throwing the sheets at a complete stranger, sending it to your podiatrist, you get it.

And if you haven’t upgraded your subscription yet, now’s the time. There’s over four years of this nihilistic kitchen bullshit ready for you to read—that’s over 200 editions, by my estimation. I think that’s worth an easy $50 a year.

You get access to the full archives, about half of which are locked (plus exclusive editions!), and now I’ve embarked on some fun things, like readings. Don’t miss out.

Okay, Substack’s telling me I’m way over today—so I’ll have to cut it short here. As always, I love you all. See you next week. And avoid Chicken Dunkers.