Mr. KON "Thai Tom Yum"

Brand: Mr. KON
Flavour: Thai Tom Yum
Format: cardboard bowl
Packets: three
Identifiables: noodle brick, carrot bits, dried seaweed, swirly thing, spice
Sodium: 2.46 grams

I figured I'd wait to post anything at all until I had a good scary one to really hook my readers. The first two were pretty tame, though, so today I decided to go with one that I knew wouldn't disappoint.

Holy crap.

To start with, the lid has "X-Large" printed in friendly letters. Whatever was in there, I knew I'd be eating a lot of it. Also, a quick look at the nutrition facts indicated that I'd be acquiring one-hundred-three percent of my recommended daily sodium in this meal. Great googly moogly. Then, I opened it up to see a tiny plastic fork (you can see the orange chopsticks I turned out to not even need) accompanied by a mammoth cylindrical (well, a truncated cone, but whatever) noodle brick and three packets. The packets had absolutely no identifiable text (well, none that wasn't in Chinese), and bore the ominous numbers – 18a, 03c, and 10b – the last of which contained a viscous orange liquid. One of the ingredients listed in the difficult-to-read rung around the lid is "Sour flavor". This, friends, was a winner even before I added boiling water up to the barely-visible ridge and waited three minutes.

The spice packet had little black shrivels (you try finding a better word for 'em) that I guessed to be bits of seaweed. Upon opening the bowl after cooking, I saw that they did indeed unfold into satisfying, glossy olive-coloured leaves. Somewhere in the bowl is one of those little swirly discs with the zig-zag edge, you know the ones. I anticipated that the heat for this bowl would be a four based on its classification as tom yum, and if it were anything less I'd be disappointed. The yellow-orange oil floating on top was deceptive, as it shook my faith for a moment, but... well, the flavour was completely different from what I expected and thus exceeded my hopes.

Let's talk about the flavour. There's a sharp spice combined with a light but almost acrid taste. "Sour flavor", indeed. It smells and tastes only faintly of seafood, but there's a citrus note that overpowers like a sousaphone versus a wind quartet. The strange part is, none of it tastes particularly bad, just... very, very odd, and strangely bland.

A third of the way in, I found myself wondering if I'd be able to finish it. I started to get that puckering-throat thing that says, "You're drinking vinegar, or something akin to it." I downed some CFDDP (Caffeine-Free Diet Dr Pepper, and that's the last time I'll spell the name out) and found the tastes not terribly complementary. Two-thirds of the way in, I saw the swirly thing and also a little long rectangular thing which was a thin layer of dark pink on top of a white bar. It was either the world's smallest maguro nigiri-zushi, or the world's worst-dressed hyphen.

Then I got down to drinking the broth. Let's just do the numbers, shall we?

Numbers: packaging 4, preparation 3, heat 4, flavour 2, overall 2
Music: Blue Öyster Cult - Rock Band (X360) - Don't Fear the Reaper