Want to impress dinner guests but you’re not a top notch chef? Knock their socks off by making your shitty food look pretentious! Tonight we’re eating $1 microwaveable pizzas!
First you’re going to want to make sure you select the shittiest type of pizzas possible; you can’t find that at a Safeway or Giant. You’re going to want to make a special trip to a Shoppers Food Warehouse.
First you’re going to want to make sure you select the shittiest type of pizzas possible; you can’t find that at a Safeway or Giant. You’re going to want to make a special trip to a Shoppers Food Warehouse.
Shoppers has some traditional frozen pizzas like Red Baron and DiGiorno, but you’re going to want to go to the end of the freezer case where the pizzas are only $1 a piece. If you’re paying more than a dollar then you’re in the wrong store. If they’re having a sale that is 4 for a dollar then you’re in the right place! Shoppers if full of deals on shitty food!
I decided to go balls out for this meal, so I went ahead and spent $3! How could I not? They had a combination flavor pizza! That’s my favorite! Be sure to take note of the packaging. If it say’s “Pizza for one” on there than you know it’s shitty. They’re basically saying, “Don’t worry loser, no one will be around to judge you while you eat this sad meal.” The package also say’s, “Enjoy and save!“. When the tastiest element of the food is the savings you know it’s pure shit, so why not treat yourself to all three? I’m not poor; lets cook this shit up!
You’re probably saying to yourself, “Kyle I thought you were making microwaveable pizza. Why is this being cooked in a toaster oven?” There are two reasons for the toaster oven, (1) it gives the pizza a little burned look which by the end of this will make your guests think it was made in a brick oven right there in your kitchen and (2) why rush to the saddest part of your day? A microwave only gets you there faster.
Once all three of your amazing pizza flavors are cooked, you’ll want to start plating. I don’t have any plates that are pretentious enough, but I do have married friends. My friends Scott and Megan were just married so they have all kinds of new pretentious cook and dinner ware!
I walked into their kitchen and when I saw this plate I immediately exclaimed, “What the fuck is that plate for?”. If you don’t know what the plate is for thean you do know that it’s perfectly pretentious! More of their dishware will be making future appearances, but now we’re ready to add our pizza!
An essential theme that you’ll see on this blog is that you have to cut the main course into small, nearly unrecognizable pieces. This will help mask the fact that what your guests are eating is pure crap. It also pretty pretentious to serve tiny portions. You want people to leave your dinner feeling hungry. Arrange the pieces in interesting ways and in odd numbers (I went with a set of 5). Having pizza pointing in all different directions will keep people’s eyes moving so they’ll barely notice that what they’re eating is pure crap! That brings me to another important theme for this meal: Distract, distract, distract; add enough additional things to the plate to divert the attention from the pizza itself. Your dinner guests will never realize that what they were eating cost a total of 30 cents until the next day when it’s waaaaaaaay too late.
Start by adding cracked pepper. If you don’t have cracked pepper, just use regular pepper. Get this it doesn’t really matter! Pepper tastes like pepper unless you’re an asshole. That is kind of the goal here though, so tell everyone that it’s 7 different types of cracked pepper. Regardless of the kind of pepper you have always apply at least 18 inches above the plate. Let me be clear, this does absolutely nothing except get pepper all over the place, but I’ve seen chef’s do it on T.V. and it seems to be the most pretentious way to apply pepper.
Next add some Parmesan cheese. Shitty Parmesan cheese in one of those big green plastic bottles is preferred. Sort out a few of the big chunks and drop them from 12 inches above the plate. They’ll explode all over the plate and which will make it look like the ingredients were just spilling right off the pizza! Spreading out the ingredients will force people to smear everything together. I’ve found that giving people a task while eating helps take their mind off the food. By that point you’ll be having them ask themselves, “Where am I Olive Garden?!“
We’re well on our way now, but we need to make this pizza feel like it was made in the home country by an old Italian chef. Lets add the rest of the colors from the Italian flag. Thinly slice some Roma tomatoes and stratergically place them on the plate. “Kyle are Roma tomoatoes all the way from Rome?” Of course not. They’re from a greenhouse and they’re the cheapest and shittiest version of tomato that the store has to offer. We’ll slice them so thin no one will know the difference.
Next add some basil for the green in the Italian flag. DO NOT USE FRESH BASIL!!!!! I don’t care if you have some, it will taste far too good and people will know something is up. Dried basil is best.
At this point I think this plate would go for about $20 at Ristorante de Giovanni Garibaldi. Oh you’ve never heard of that restaurant or that chef? No one has. I made them up, but when people ask who I learned to cook such amazing pizza from I always tell them it was Chef Garibaldi. Just went up to $25. Now add some olive oil – extra virgin…not that sloppy seconds olive oil. The oil will allow people to smear all this together which I mentioned before.
How can this $3 meal possibly get more pretentious? Sprinkle some cheddar cheese on that shit and put it back in the over to really bring it on home! Even though we only used two cheeses, tell them it’s a three cheese blend. I don’t know why, but people like three cheese blends. Also when you put it on the counter for serving, remind people that you’ve traveled to Italy by putting out pictures of Italy and some wine. No one likes to get one upped by travel stories and your guests will start telling their travel stories which is to important to the taste.
“When we were in Florence we found this little cafe owned by an old Italian couple that we went to everyday for a slice of pizza. It had been in their family for 250 generation and they had the freshest ingrediants right from the hills of Tuscany. I think we were the only ones that knew about it“
Ha it was all a ploy! Little do they know that the pleasant memories will just trigger the release of endorphins; before they know it they’ll be licking their plate by the end of the meal and begging for more.
“When we were in Florence we found this little cafe owned by an old Italian couple that we went to everyday for a slice of pizza. It had been in their family for 250 generation and they had the freshest ingrediants right from the hills of Tuscany. I think we were the only ones that knew about it“
Ha it was all a ploy! Little do they know that the pleasant memories will just trigger the release of endorphins; before they know it they’ll be licking their plate by the end of the meal and begging for more.
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