Last night I whooped up a nice nuclear Heat-N-Eat dinner which featured Chicken Twinkies as the main course. I usually like to take more of a from-scratch approach, but sometimes when you’re short on time or other ingredients, it’s fun to try something that should probably have a skull and crossbones somewhere on the box.

What are Chicken Twinkies, you say? They are little chicken footballs available in your grocer’s freezer section that come in a coffin that looks like the image to the right. Mmm… makes you salivate, doesn’t it?

They come filled with various mysterious goos of your choice: Butter, Broccoli and Cheese, or Cordon Bleu. We enjoyed the Cordon Bleu blend last night, and although it was a very bizarre dining experience, they were quite delicious.

I say ‘bizarre’ because I’m not exactly sure how they’re built (and probably don’t want to know) and the Cordon Blue not only had cheese in it, but ham as well. Every time I’ve had chicken in the past, I’ve never found other meat in it. At least not that I know of – fast food places manage to hide that stuff pretty well. But inside these Chicken Twinkes is ham. This leads me to think that perhaps this chicken meat goes through a few alterations prior to becoming the final product that it is. (Gee wiz, Mike, you think so?) I cannot imagine it being too easy to inject a solid ball of chicken meat with ham and cheese and am curious as to how such a thing is assembled. I assume it goes something like this:

1. Roll cheese into small ball
2. Wrap with sheets of delicious thin-sliced Ham Food. ‘Ham Food’ is what I envision they use – it’s a product of my imagination, but I really can’t think of how else you’d get ham to stay in that shape. I reckon it’s a maleable, pliable silly-putty type of meat which hardens and develops a lifelike ham texture when laid out to dry.
3. Roll Ham Food/cheese balls in chicken paste until 1/2″ thick accumulation of chicken paste adheres to Ham Food/cheese ball.
4. Roll Ham Food/cheese/chicken ball in layer of fattening breading and deep fry to solidify.
5. Package up and ship to grocery stores where ignorant consumers will buy them with little regards to how fucked up what they’re going to eat really is.

Yeah, it’s really pretty unappetizing, isn’t it?? But we eat it anyways, and damn is it ever good. As in “I know I just ate one but I want another Chicken Twinkie” good. We had sides of corn and Rice-A-Roni to balance it out, so it wasn’t all that toxic. I think.

Next time you’re in your grocer’s freezer section and are feeling a little risky, pick some of these up. It’s been about 24 hours and I’m still alive and kickin’, so they can’t be all that harmful.

On a side note, why is ‘ham’ called ‘ham’ and not ‘pig’? When you eat chicken, you call it ‘chicken’. Same goes for turkey. No other fancy terms are used; you call it what it is. But there ain’t no meat I know of that people serve and refer to as ‘pig’. It’s either bacon, pork, or ham. That’s 3 different names of meats from one animal and a little misleading if you ask me. You don’t see a pig on a farm and say “Oh look, kids – there’s a ham!”