30 July 2011

Tiger Tiger – Easy Snacks Pad Thai Noodles [By @SpectreUK]



Takeouts in American movies and sitcoms, like Becker, always seem to come in small cardboard containers, which appear to me to be good for the environment, but worry me that they could leak sauce all over my lap. The same concern hit me when I saw this Tiger Tiger Easy Snax Pad Thai Noodles carton on the shelf in the local supermarket. Overwhelmed with curiosity I decided to give it a try, whilst blanking out the old saying regarding cats, death and curiosity. Let’s hope the cat’s dinner doesn’t leak all over his meatballs whilst he’s trying to watch a movie!
On picking an appropriate takeout movie, I decided on an old John Wayne classic, Rio Lobo. I packed Cinabar off to the shops and wondered over to the microwave oven. As you’ll see from the box’s contents in the second photograph; there was a packet of tagliatelle style noodles, a silver packet of Pad Thai sauce and a dodgy fork inside. I say dodgy because it just wouldn’t fit together and kept falling apart. Unless I was having a dippy moment the fork was dodgy! I decided to file the fork under recycling (exactly where the cardboard container would be going after eating its contents) and use a metal fork instead. I snipped open the noodles first, taking care with the scissors due to being a big kid and having no adults present, and flopped the slippery looking fellows into the carton. I opened the silver sauce packet next dumping the brown goo all over the noodles. Just less than two minutes in the microwave oven and the Pad Thai Easy Snax was ready to serve.
I enjoyed the first half of the old western with a sweet juicy Pad Thai sauce mixed in with the slim line slippery noodles. The Easy Snax cooled to an eating temperature nice and quickly, so there was negligible slurping at the start of the film. The sauce has a caramel sweetness to it with a hint of onion and spice from chilli, paprika and garlic. There was plenty of sauce to go around, which didn’t dry out during eating whilst watching Big John strut his stuff. There is a danger with a meal like this that you can get sick of the sauce before finishing. I was glad to enjoy the snack until the carton was empty. There was no pool of liquid at the bottom of the container and no leakage during the movie, asides some of my own when Big John took a slug in the leg towards the end. Rio Lobo was excellent and the Easy Snax was an enjoyable treat I will no doubt revisit. I’ll have to look for Tiger Tiger’s other flavours, which include Sweet and Sour, Green Curry, Satay Sauce and Penang Curry, and watch some other classic westerns just as soon as I can kick Cinabar out to the shops again!
By Spectre

1 comment:

KJBweb said...

I'm eating these at the moment (literally, right now)!

The first thing I noticed when I took it off the shelf was the weight of the carton! I recently tried "Naked Noodles" which were similar in presentation (cardboard carton) though they were dried noodles which required boiling water to heat. They were incredibly disappointing, smelt great though tasted of nothing.

These however, they're on another level. The traditional Thai noodle sauce is seriously nice, and as this isn't a "just add water" affair it ensures they're not more of a soup like most others.

The only downside is that the noodles end up pretty torn up once you've stirred them about with a form initially (to break them up as they're vacuum packed; though I suspect if I was a little more careful then they'd be fine.

The best thing about these is they're the first pot-noodle(ish) meal that actually leaves me feeling as though I've had a decent meal and overall, satisfied.

8/10

Improvements:
> Slightly cheaper: at £2 a pop (Tesco, 2011) they're quite a bit more expensive than their rivals (though also 5 times heavier too!)

> Better fork: As mentioned in the post above, the fork is pretty useless though not an issue for most.