Convenience Store Frozen Pasta, Not So Bad!

Frozen food has come a long way in Japan. In a culture where many people are too busy to cook or find it's not worth the time or effort to cook for oneself, ready-made, instant, and frozen food can be readily found. My image of frozen food growing up was that they were fast and simple, good for when pressed for time, but still tasted like it was frozen. Nowadays frozen food could trick anyone into thinking it was made from fresh ingredients.

Take this pasta for example. It's a product in the "Okaasan no Shokudo" line-up that is found at the Family Mart convenience store, the name owing homage to 'mom's cooking'. The package indicated that the end product is like fresh pasta with shrimp umami and a rich tomato cream sauce. Inside you will find a rock hard solid pack of the frozen sauce and pasta that you just pop into the microwave!

I found the sauce to be really rich in tomato flavour, more than the light orange colour leads to you think. The noodles were a bit softer than al dente, but still had a slight bite. The shrimp was plump, but the downside was that it did have a bit of a fishy flavour giving away the fact that it is not fresh. The broccoli surprisingly had a good texture and wasn't mushy at all. Overall, it was tasty, something you might expect to appear in mom's repertoire of cooking!