rounding third

Supermarkets are crazy places to begin with
ever more so on Friday evenings
and today was definitely not an exception.

I had a short list. I had made a major shopping trip the first
of the month that covered the basic necessities and filled the
pantry with the foodstuff staples. Of course, as always, i had
forgotten a couple things, plus didn't get anything of the true
splurge type items to satisfy whims and cravings. I would have
been able to go through the express lane, if only it had been
open, and if a cart would fit through the express lane, they
are set up for only the hand baskets or what you can carry
in your arms. I did not have many items, but some were much
too large to fit in a hand basket, and too bulky to drag all of it
around the store in my arms, so I had to use a cart. I don't know,
maybe a 12-pack of paper towels is pushing the boundaries of
the express lane after all.

There's no calling Dominos or Pizza Hut for delivery where I live
so pizza cravings are sated with either a night on the town or
by keeping a couple of frozen ones on-call in the freezer. The
store seemed to be having a special on every brand of pizza
that they stocked. I was down to just one in the freezer and
was hankering to have a couple slices for dinner, so I picked up
four pizzas, a couple brands I hadn't tried before.

I have always preferred thin crispy crusts on my pizza, and have
been very happy that over the past few years more and more
brands of frozen pizza have come out with thin crust varieties.
One of the new pizzas I grabbed up was from Freschetta, a brand
I used to pass by because of their thick self-rising crusts, but they
now had a spinach-mushroom-chicken on a thin crust which I
thought sounded yummy.

When I got home and started unpacking the pizza I discovered
there were lots of new things about this pizza. Things I missed
by not reading all of the packaging. First, the pizza came packed
on its own pan. Well, not really a pan, but yet a pan of sorts,
a one-use compressed paper pan to bake it on. I started to
toss the "pan" and just bake the pizza on the wire rack the way
I bake other frozen pizzas, but then I discovered new-thing #2 -
I couldn't really bake the whole pizza on the wire rack, because,
well, it wasn't actually a whole pizza. Yes! I did buy a whole pie
in fact I bought two of them, but the pizzas themselves are not
whole. Not whole as in it is a "whole" pizza but in pieces. The
pizza was pre-cut! So you need the pan it comes on to keep the
wedges from falling through the oven rack.

I had no idea that there were people in the world that needed
their pizza pre-cut. I mean, come on folks, sliced bread is one
thing, but are you telling me that you can't make four cuts to
sub-divide your pizza into eight slices? Really it is kind of
superfluous because while the Freschetta pre-cut pizza is in the
oven baking on its special little paper pan, the eight pre-cut
slices tend to bake together anyway as the cheese on top melts
and swarms into the gaps between the slices glueing them
together. When you remove the pizza from the oven you still
must cut the slices apart, and it can be hard to tell where the
pre-cuts are. You have to wonder what marketing group thought
that the pre-cut feature is one that consumers couldn't live without.

Once baked, and properly cut, the pizza is pretty tasty. The spinach
was not as well distributed as some other brands, it was in about
4 or 5 clumps, and the crust was more like medium thick than thin,
but definitely not thick like Freschetta's rising crust. The quantities
of cheese and chicken were adequate for a frozen pizza, meaning
there was enough but you'd like a little more. The mushrooms were
a bit skimpy and sliced paper thin, they need to be thicker slices and
really needs more of them. For the $4.29 sale price the pizza was an
OK deal, but I probably won't buy any of them at the regular price.