So this time around, the weirdness has been
kicked up to a 26.78 on a 1-10 scale. With Kracie’s Happy Kitchen Hamburger, a
handsome sir/madam can make their very own dinner date for two. I don’t know
how else to describe this. Here’s some key stats to take away today:
Brand: Kracie
Name: Happy Kitchen Hamburger
Engl(r)ish Slogan: “Happy Kitchen” (well,
that’s kind of boring)
Mass: 22g
Total Calories per Mass: 95 calories
Price: $5.65 at T&T
Cost per Calorie: 5.95 cents/calorie (damn,
that’s expensive yo!)
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| Colourful box! |
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| Japanese! |
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| More wasteful packaging! |
The box is a colourful smorgasbord of
katakana and the typical fast-food vanity photos. Like every good Big Mac,
Whopper or Baconator, this is a bit of foreshadowing for the actual appearance
of the treat. Flipping the box over, there are some instructions about to
create the snack. Now I can’t read Japanese, but even by just looking at the
pictures, one can see that there’s a lot of stirring involved.
When you open up the box, bags upon bags of
powder make their presence known. At this moment, I was simply just
flabbergasted, thinking to myself about all the real fast food that could have
been bought for the dough. It does come with a nice little plastic spatula and
knife, for use in the back-breaking manual labour to come.
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| Looking like the reject pile of ramen flavour packs |
Quick tip for all happy kitchen chef de
cuisines here. You’re going to NEED to provide a microwave to turn the powder
into something you can eat, and having a pair of scissors on hand is VERY
USEFUL so that you can make it look half as nice as you see on the box. I was
making this at home, so no worries there; however, if I had wanted to be more
ironic than the other kids at school and eat a Happy Kitchen meal for lunch,
some preparation is going to be needed so that I don’t look like I’m trying to snort
some coke.
Making my mini meal had to be the most
labour-intensive ordeal outside of digging holes alongside a certain Yelnats.
Even with help, I spent a good 30 minutes making the Happy Kitchen Hamburger
mini combo. If McDonald’s took this long to make a burger & fries combo,
they’d have gone out of business way before the Big Mac was invented to clog
the arteries of people everywhere.
I spent a lot of time cutting the many
place mats and cutting mats out of the packaging (props to creative use of
packaging!) and making the fries, patties, bun, and cheese. The process for
making each part of the meal is pretty similar. Dump powder and water into the
mixing tray. Stir it up like you’re churning butter. Put your goop into the
microwave, or in the case of the cheese, catsup, and coke, marvel at how the
powder and water looking and smell eerily similar to the real thing. And when the
fries, patties, and bun are out of the microwave, do the same thing. I was a
little freaked out by how the bags of powder transformed into pretty convincing
facsimiles of their normal-food counterparts with just a few drops of water and
a bit of time in the microwave. This speaks a lot about Japanese ingenuity (or
weirdness) and the fast food we feed ourselves on.
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| Step 1: Cutting my mini sinks |
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| Step 2: adding the powder for the bun |
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| Step 3: adding the patty powder |
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| The finished patty product |
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| Step 5: Assembling the burger |
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| Step 6: Spreading them condiments |
With this nasty prep work out of the way, here are some glamour shots!
So, to sum up, it was one of those
experiences I’m happy to only try once, much like getting extremely drunk one
night and waking up hugging a toilet. Now this doesn’t mean I’m not willing to
try some of the other things this company has to offer. If you are reading this
Kracie, I am open for review samples!
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| Dusted |
Final Score: 2 Calbee Dogs out of 5
