Skip to main content

A New Strain

I like pizza. It is one of the items that I can happily eat over and over again, with nary a complaint (burritos are the other item in this category). On some level, it's a simple recipe: bread, sauce, cheese, and toppings. The toppings, it should be noted, don't have to be anything fancy. Sure, some restaurants try to differentiate themselves by using nicer ovens or high-end ingredients. But at its core, you really just need some dough and a few toppings. It's fun in its simplicity.

Personally, the reason I like it so much is that it's a hearty food. Let's not forget that the base of this whole thing is basically a really flat bread. That's the sort of food that's meant to provide sustenance. Put another way, I've never seen someone go on a diet and insist that they should eat pizza to get their nutrition for the day (I have seen a salad-heavy rich people diet, though). You just wouldn't describe pizza as a dainty item.

Fortunately for me, the Mild Wife shares this love of pizza; she calls them tasty open-faced sandwiches. If you think about it, it makes sense. You're basically taking the ingredients that you might've put in a sandwich (cheese, meat, sauce), and laying them on a flat piece of dough/bread. Also, let's not forget that she made and packed some pizza as our on-flight snack.

Now, for all that we like trying different foods and sampling new restaurants, we will both happily have Costco pizza for a meal. No one would mistake their food court pizza as gourmet, but we just flat out like it. It has a good mix of toppings, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. All in all, I think we probably have it once a month on average, though there have definitely been some months where we have purchased said pizza more than once.

My favorite reaction to pizza, however, came recently. I was heading over to a friend's place, and he'd bought Costco's take and bake pizza. Neither the Mild Wife nor I have ever had the take and bake variety before, so we were somewhat intrigued by this. Had we been missing out on a different, tastier variety of Costco pizza this whole time? Was it a better buy to get the take and bake kind rather than the food court kind? We were abuzz with questions.

The Mild Wife, however, had specific instructions: take notes. She wanted to know where it came from, and whether or not we should switch our Costco pizza budget to a new variety. I made sure to eat my food more slowly that night, so as to get a very deliberate taste of the pizza.

In the end, I liked the pizza just fine, but I didn't recommend switching to the new version. Still, the fact that I took mental notes about a pizza made me chuckle as I was eating. It's a fun food, I tell you.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...