Cheese and Infidelity

Mmm Hot Pockets. Bastardization of a calzone. Jim Gaffigan knows what I'm talking about.

A year or two ago, I started making naan pizzas. I made one pear and cheese pizza--easiest fanciest meal to make.

For this recipe, I made my own pizza dough. Turns out, if you have a show to binge, that's super easy, too. I followed a recipe I found online, but used wheat flour instead of white. So technically, it's my own recipe---I think that's how that works, right?

When I'm feeling sluggish or in a bad mood, I tend to blame it on white flour.

Health, turns out, is the same as everything else in my life. I prioritize it 90% of the time, so I can eat cake for breakfast once a month, and completely pig out on pizza and beer when the moment calls for it.

Pro tip:

If you don't have a rolling pin, use a wine bottle!

I decided to spread this recipe out over two days, although the dough rose in less than 90 minutes, so I could have easily made these the first night.

Since this was hot pockets and not specifically a calzone, I had an opportunity to get creative. What I thought would go together well, and I was right, was crab, broccoli and cheese. There are few things I love more than broccoli and cheese.

This is my hot pocket with too thick of crust, too little cheese. I had to stretch the dough over the top, making a thick bed below the topping and a thin top.

If you want a good topping/crust ratio (much better than the ones pictured here)---think of these as quesadillas. Make the dough really thin and then only cover half with the topping.

Some of mine turned out better than others, but I found out soon that I made the dough way too thick. Next time, I'm going to press that wine bottle even harder and make a nice thin crust.

As you can see below...they came out looking like potatoes! If you don't get white bread cranky like I do, yours will turn out golden brown.

This is my hot pocket. It turned out more like a large dinner roll with a bite of food inside. I love bread, so it was still good, but not nearly as cheesy as it should have been.

But I realized...these are hot pockets! I can break it in half, load more cheese in, and microwave it! While that did make it cheesier, I also remembered I'm minorly lactose intolerant...and got a stomach cramp.

That was my hot pocket adventure! I don't have a good rating system for my blog yet, but this food was:

Easy

Cheap

Fun to customize

Works well for full meal size or lil snack bites, once you figure out the proportions!

The episode:

Had a lot of thoughts recently.

Rewrote this blog post four times. That’s how much I needed an outlet.

But I came to a decision that this is writing---what kind of writer do I want to be?

What am I trying to express?

So here’s a short story:

She went out to dinner with a couple. A new friendship forming over podcasts and miniseries. Recommendations and discussions.

They order drinks. The wife abstains. They tell her their pregnancy wasn’t planned.

Ew. She thinks. I don’t want to think about you two having sex.

It’s a tiny miracle, they say, and we decided to embrace it.

It is not a miracle. You missed a pill, or broke a condom, or pulled out too late. That’s not a miracle, that’s human error.

She doesn’t want to think about what position they conceived in. All she can think is there are ways to prevent it.

The Host, she thinks, is supposed to be an anti-abortion book, about how terrible it is when something wants to kill something smaller and more helpless than it. But it’s not anti-abortion, it’s pro-abortion. The alien parasite takes over “The Host”, and she fights the whole book to get rid of it. It’s her body, why should she have to share it---to give it up? Why should she have to give up her autonomy for a parasitic creature? Screw that.

That’s what she thinks at least. She remembers falling asleep during the movie. Maybe it’s a harsh comparison, but she didn’t write the book.

"In the book, he didn't care about his wife. He only tried to find the cure once his dog got hurt."

"Go figure"

She just nods. Takes a breath to catch up on her surroundings.

They’re talking about Will Smith movies, and she hasn’t spoken a word for fifteen minutes. She nods again. Politely unengaged. Why would you give up your autonomy?

When she goes to bed that night it’s the first night in a while she doesn’t wish there was someone beside her. That she’s not falling asleep alone.