Convenience

I’ll tell you what’s sad about being a cookbook author. You may forget to shop for normal food, but you will generally have ingredients for nutritional disasters on hand at all times. Which is why I am about to make another pizza. It’s either that or drive to Winn-Dixie to check out the on-sale meat.

I’m almost angry at Winn-Dixie for discounting meat all the time. I used to go into the store and buy what I wanted. Now I feel like I’m not allowed to buy anything that costs over six dollars per pound, and I try to stay under two dollars.

Finding out that Costco cheese is actually pretty good has been a problem. I have several pounds of it, and I bought a couple of cans of delicious Stanislaus Super Dolce sauce the other day, and I feel like I have an obligation to eat all the cheese before it turns green. So I have to eat about three pounds a week. I also want to test it in calzones, so I have to make some of those this week. I think calzones should be less demanding, because my big concern with the cheese is that the low fat content will cause it to scorch, and inside a calzone, scorching isn’t an issue.

Thank God I don’t have ricotta, or I’d be making calzones with that, too. When it comes to calzones, I like pizza sauce, mozzarella, and maybe ricotta. But it seems like most pizzerias just use ricotta and maybe some crap to season it.

It’s a shame I didn’t go into calzones in the book, because you can make absolutely anything into a calzone, and they’re fantastic. If you have the book, just decide what you want to calzonify, make a 14-16″ circle of my dough, plop the ingredients on one side, fold the other side over, and seal the edges together by wetting them with water and pressing. If you haven’t made a cheesesteak calzone, your life has been wasted. Or a pan con lechon calzone. Oh. Oh.

I have been told that Paula Deen uses cottage cheese in lasagne. Sounds horrifying and WASPy, but I can’t argue with her reputation. Maybe I’ll put a spoonful on the pizza somewhere to see what it’s like.

Mike may be coming into town this week. He could definitely help me get rid of that cheese. Is it immoral to feed your excess cheese to a friend, knowing it’s just as bad for him as it is for you? I guess. But sometimes you have to look out for Number One.

It’s funny, but there are some TV chefs almost nobody criticizes. It seems like some chefs can’t manage to write a single recipe that pans out for home viewers, but others rarely fail. Paula Deen and Alton Brown seem to fit that description. You never hear anyone say, “I tried Alton Brown’s recipe for X, and it was disgusting.”

I would be really uncomfortable if I had a successful show and a string of restaurants, and most of my food was bad. I guess I’m nuts.

Pizza is imminent.