Dinner, bachelor style
May. 19th, 2007 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnI really shouldn't be posting this. If I kept it quiet, no one would ever know and the whole thing would just go away. But in the interest of finally writing a decent entry , letting the Internet share the story and not worrying about my reputation, this is an account of dinner this evening.
The plan was simple. Home-made pizza. It's not the most amazingly complex of meals, but still respectable enough to be impressive for someone who doesn't normally cook for himself. The last time Whitney and I tried it, it all got stuck to the baking pan and could only be removed by chiselling at it with a fork for hours, and I was determined to do it right this time.
Again, in a none too complicated fashion, I went for chicken and pepperoni as my toppings. I've always found chicken a terribly frightening thing to cook because it'll obviously kill you instantly if you so much as touch it when it's raw, so I always end up frying it for about four hours and it's as dry as a sheet of paper by the time it comes out. Not this time, though - in fact, I'd like to think I got a rather perfectly done chicken thigh.
Rolling the dough isn't a difficult task either, even though the stuff I was using seemed pretty resistant to my efforts to actually spread it out. Nevertheless, I guessed that that was just because it had been in the freezer for a while. After battering it a bit with the rolling pin, I got it into something resembling a circle, oiled a biscuit sheet, slapped it on and threw it in the oven.
About ten minutes later I came back to see that it had formed a huge mountain in the middle. (I was later told by Whitney that you're meant to puncture dough before you put it in the oven to stop it from doing that. Who knew?) Still, this was easily solved by battering it down a bit with a spatula. After that, it doesn't take Gordon Ramsay to know that you slather it in tomato-based sauce and put cheese on top along with your choice of topping - cubed chicken and sliced pepperoni. What could be simpler?
So after about another ten minutes, I went back to check it. It seemed ready enough, so I got it out, tipped it on to a plate and, after a painstaking half hour or so avoiding any kitchen-related disasters, sat down for dinner.
That was when I realized I'd used piecrust instead of pizza dough.
The result was a perfectly formed, crispy, flaky pie crust - one that happened to have a load of cheese, chicken and pepperoni on top of it. Or, to put it another way, the ugliest, saltiest pizza in the world.
After trying a couple of bites, then staring at it with mixed feelings of despair and hysteria, I scraped the toppings off on to a slice of naan. Then I rolled it up and ate that instead in a kind of salad wrap arrangement, cusring the Gods of Home Economics for making a mockery of me once again.
I think I'll stick to salad from now on.
The plan was simple. Home-made pizza. It's not the most amazingly complex of meals, but still respectable enough to be impressive for someone who doesn't normally cook for himself. The last time Whitney and I tried it, it all got stuck to the baking pan and could only be removed by chiselling at it with a fork for hours, and I was determined to do it right this time.
Again, in a none too complicated fashion, I went for chicken and pepperoni as my toppings. I've always found chicken a terribly frightening thing to cook because it'll obviously kill you instantly if you so much as touch it when it's raw, so I always end up frying it for about four hours and it's as dry as a sheet of paper by the time it comes out. Not this time, though - in fact, I'd like to think I got a rather perfectly done chicken thigh.
Rolling the dough isn't a difficult task either, even though the stuff I was using seemed pretty resistant to my efforts to actually spread it out. Nevertheless, I guessed that that was just because it had been in the freezer for a while. After battering it a bit with the rolling pin, I got it into something resembling a circle, oiled a biscuit sheet, slapped it on and threw it in the oven.
About ten minutes later I came back to see that it had formed a huge mountain in the middle. (I was later told by Whitney that you're meant to puncture dough before you put it in the oven to stop it from doing that. Who knew?) Still, this was easily solved by battering it down a bit with a spatula. After that, it doesn't take Gordon Ramsay to know that you slather it in tomato-based sauce and put cheese on top along with your choice of topping - cubed chicken and sliced pepperoni. What could be simpler?
So after about another ten minutes, I went back to check it. It seemed ready enough, so I got it out, tipped it on to a plate and, after a painstaking half hour or so avoiding any kitchen-related disasters, sat down for dinner.
That was when I realized I'd used piecrust instead of pizza dough.
The result was a perfectly formed, crispy, flaky pie crust - one that happened to have a load of cheese, chicken and pepperoni on top of it. Or, to put it another way, the ugliest, saltiest pizza in the world.
After trying a couple of bites, then staring at it with mixed feelings of despair and hysteria, I scraped the toppings off on to a slice of naan. Then I rolled it up and ate that instead in a kind of salad wrap arrangement, cusring the Gods of Home Economics for making a mockery of me once again.
I think I'll stick to salad from now on.
