The unexpectedly constant food changes

There are many things I haven’t found time to post about over the past month or so, and, it turns out, many of the missing posts are about food. Like this one.

You wouldn’t think something as simple as pizza would change so much in only one year, but change has been constant all along my journey, so, I guess it makes sense. In March of last year, I posted online about the return of a supermarket pizza brand that Nigel and I used to have all the time, and that I continued to have a lot until the factory burned down. I published a blog post about it, too. That first sampling of the resurrected brand was disappointing.

Over the past year, I’ve tried this brand a couple more times, always with a lot of cheese and herbs added. I also decided to ignore the package instructions to bake on in a pre-heated pizza tray and instead baked it directly on the oven rack, which made the base a bit crispier (fan bake instead of regular also helped). Those were definite improvements, but the new pizza was still just kind of “almost okay, I guess”, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

There was an Australian frozen pizza I found last year, but it’s either discontinued or not shipped to New Zealand anymore, because it’s disappeared from both supermarket chains. That same Aussie company makes a different variety that I ranked higher than the Romano’s: My ranking was “okay, I guess”.

Since then, I’ve tried another NZ-made frozen pizza brand because they had a variety they called “very thin crust”, which, while true compared to other supermarket pizzas in NZ, it’s merely ordinary thin crust by my standards (and ironically, the brand is called “Chicago” for some reason, even though it’s nothing like genuine Chicago pizza). The particular “very thin crust” varieties from that company aren’t always easy to find, and when I do, the base of pizza is usually partly folded, which isn’t ideal.

All of which is an issue for me, because since moving to Kirikiriroa-Hamilton, I had frozen pizza nearly every Friday night, partly because Nigel and I used to have takeaways every Friday (it was seldom pizza, though), and he’d pick it up on his way home. Back then, it gave me a night off from cooking, but now, even frozen pizza involves some work, of course. Pizza delivery isn’t really an option: Depending on where I get it from, one delivery pizza costs around four to six times the cost of a frozen supermarket one, and that would be fine if I thought the delivered ones were much nicer, but they just not. Better? Sure, one from a New Zealand chain can sometimes they can much better, but the quality varies, so I’ve never once craved one of those delivery pizzas. Only one of the American pizza chains delivers to my house, and it’s not really all that good.

These struggles made me think that it may be time to give up and switch to some other unhealthy treat meal that I don’t have to cook. However, last week my brother-in-law told me about a Mediterranean food products shop that sells (among lots of cool products…) frozen pizza dough in a pack of two balls. All you have to do is thaw it and roll it out—and then I just have to add the sauce, cheese, and any other toppings. I’ve failed at making pizza bases from scratch, but maybe this will be an alternative?

However, if those frozen bases still aren’t what I want, it may well be time to give up. I have no idea what my new regular obsession might be if the frozen bases aren’t nice.

Sometimes I think change really is the only constant in the universe.