Hot Slut Of The Day!
Ragù Express!
At the start of the aughts, Ragù, the grocery store tomato sauce that any Italian will tell you is as authentic as their Italian grandmother’s homemade sauce (served on a bed of spaghetti noodles made from pure sarcasm), decided to give Easy Mac a run for its lazy bitch money. Ragù Express was a gourmet Italian meal in a pouch that was ready to do the Mambo Italiano on tongues in just minutes, thanks to the microwave. Yes, so for a quick moment in the early 2000s, world-renowned Italian culinary master, Chef Boyardee, threw bitchy side-eyes at Ragù Express for trying to steal his quickie pasta crown.
In 1999, Kraft debuted Easy Mac. Two years later, Ragù Express slid onto grocery store shelves. The early aughts was a big year for nuked pasta, I guess. It came in flavors like Traditional Tomato, Pizza, and Classic Meat, even though there’s nothing “classic” about meat that can live until eternity in your kitchen cupboard. Like Easy Mac, Ragù Express was marketed as an afternoon snack that kids could easily make themselves. This Ragù Express commercial shows kids bitching and moaning about how boring and hard it is to make pasta. I’m with them. I mean, you have to boil the water, dump in the pasta… and I’m not even going to type the other two steps because even doing that is fucking EXHAUSTING. But with Ragù Express, you just dumped the pasta and water into a bowl, microwaved it, squirted pasta sauce onto it, and BAM! You were instantly transported to Sicily!
Ragù Express didn’t last very long, but Easy Mac continues to reign, and there are many, many, many other microwavable pasta products out there. Easy Mac, Ragù Express, and all the other microwavable pastas out there came out after my latchkey kid days were over and I was grown, so I had to make pasta the old-fashioned way as a kid! So whenever I see a kid eating Easy Mac, I use my walker to shuffle on over to them, and as I show them the burn scars all over my hands (there are no burn scars all over my hands), I say, “In my day, we had to boil our own water to make mac and cheese.”
Pic: Clements