TV dinner

American  

noun

1. a quick-frozen meal, typically consisting of meat, potato, and a vegetable, packaged in a tray for heating before serving.

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Etymology

Origin of TV dinner

First recorded in 1950–55

Example Sentences

But your homemade meals don’t have to resemble a frozen TV dinner, with its segmented tray of meat, an amorphous sauce, a scoop of peas or rice and a mysterious, saccharine lump of... jello?

From Salon

After they have a passive-aggressive fight about the groceries and share a silent, side-by-side TV dinner, Joshua goes upstairs for a shower.

From New York Times

Then one day, he started picking up only TV dinners and a bowl of precut fruit.

From Seattle Times

Although Swanson wasn’t the first company to create compartmentalized aluminum tray dinners, in a “stroke of marketing genius,” Swanson coined the phrase “TV dinner,” Shapiro said.

From Seattle Times

Like foil-tray frozen meals, which were used by airlines before Swanson branded them as “TV dinners,” Twitter was not initially invented to be an adjunct to the tube.

From New York Times