Franki Makes A Pizza

Most of the worst experiences in my life are directly related to foodstores. It's a wonder I food shop at all.

I was in a gourmet Giant when I happened upon something called a "pizza kit". I decided I had to have it. Once home I opened up the kit. There was a crust, two packets of sauce, and two things of cheese. Wonder why they have two of everything but the crust I said to myself. I read the directions and it said just to use one packet of everything on the crust, but since I only had one crust and didn't need a totally redundant pizza making system, and figuring the kit had been designed by an engineer brought up on the no single point of failure mantra, I decided to put on all the sauce and all the cheese. Then, following the directions, and having heated the oven for 30 minutes, I placed the crap ladened crust directly on the oven shelf. Note, the directions SAID to do this.

The pizza was supposed to cook for 20 minutes (I later found out the directions assumed the pizza was frozen and not thawed, as mine was since I had just purchased it). While it was cooking away I started making plans of all the different types of pizzas I could make, including smartie pizza made with real smarties, the best candy in the world, but not the chocolate ones, the american smarties which are pure sugar goodness made in New Jersey, the only good thing besides Sinatra to come out of Jersey, www.smarties.com.

About 13 minutes into the cooking I noticed the smoke. I had not previously had the opportunity to use the oven in my apartment, which was brand new (in fact my apartment was the first one completed in my building, and frankly I had not even noticed the oven until a guest came over and pointed it out to me, I believe I've said previously that I don't cook), so I figured there was some kind of "curing" process going on within the oven and that the smoke was normal. Then, two minutes before my delectable overly cheesy and saucy Italian snack was ready I decided to take a peak at it. That's when I saw the flames, or, to be honest, the towering inferno that was engulfing my oven. Thinking not as quickly as one would have hoped, I opened the oven, which caused a noise that sounded like "wooooosh" to come out, and then the flames. I grabbed two pot holders and a plastic spatula. I pulled out the oven shelf where my pizza was charring and tried to slide it out of the oven. The extra cheese and sauce roiled off the crumbling crust and slid down the door, on the other oven shelves, onto the bottom of the oven, and all over the heating element, whose name I know because it broke from the cheese and sauce lathering all over it like a seething lava spill. Replacing the heating element is expensive.

After the fact failure analysis indicates that the cause of the pizza fiasco was that there actually WERE two crusts in the pizza kit, although they were stuck together, and some clever little kitchen fuck who had designed the pizza kit decided the way to distinquish between pizza crust #1 and pizza crust #2 was to put a coated, i.e. extremely flammable, piece of cardboard between them. Being unfamiliar with uncooked crusts I was unable to determine that this was the case and thought I had purchased either a pan pizza crust or a double decker crust ribbed around the edges for her pleasure. I am not a crust expert. In addition, the "extra" sauce applied to the aforementioned crust could not be sustained in place when heated, so it, in effect, boiled off the pizza, taking hapless glops of melted cheese with it and burning onto the bottom of my oven and heating element. This caused the heating element to "short out" so to speak and never work again which is why they had to come in and give me a brand new oven. Also, due to the fact that the pizza crust was placed directly on the oven shelf (as stated before the directions SAID to do this) it somehow became part of the oven shelf and after the fire went out, more or less, I figured it would not be safe to remove the pizza for at least a week, so I closed the oven door and left it and eventually my apartment manager replaced the oven with a new, working oven, which I never turned on but luckily the bad smell was finally gone from my apartment and we all lived happily ever after minus $4.99 for the pizza kit and $16.78 for the backup pizza from Pizza Hut.

And the humiliation from the pizza guy standing at my door going "what's that SMELL?"?

Priceless.