I’m going to blog about food, and you can all blame Wil Wheaton.
A few days ago, Wil Wheaton posted this photo to his Tumblr, which showed off a recipe for mini pizzas made in a muffin tin, with tortillas for the crust. In addition to being adorable, they also looked delicious. Like many things I find online, I said to myself “man, I should try those!” But in what proved to be an unusual moment of motivation, I actually managed to follow through.
It all began on my way home from work on Tuesday. I had just spent the weekend out of town, and while I hadn’t come home to an empty cupboard (one of the joys of not living alone), I was low on staple foods. So as I often do, I stopped by the grocery store while I was out, awake, and dressed (all three at once is more rare than I’d like to admit). Walking around the store, I realized that because of the SCA event this weekend, there would be no practice this week, and as a result, my girlfriend and I would have to had the opportunity to cook actual meals on Wednesday and Thursday.
I was ready to pick up the usual assortment of sauces (tikka masala, marinara, etc.) and starches (rice, noodles, rice noodles, etc.) when I remembered the mini-pizzas. They had sounded good to me, and the girlfriend seemed excited as well. And I was in a perfect place to make that meal a reality. So I picked up a jar of pizza sauce (the can looked to be too big), some cheese, mini pepperonis (even though I don’t eat red meat, I had to admit they were cute), and tortillas. The recipe called for cutting tortilla sections with an empty can, but I was already making adjustments and getting creative. So I picked up the smallest tortillas I could find, hoping that they would fit in our jumbo muffin tin.
The variations continued at home as well. After preheating the oven to 400 degrees, my girlfriend and I started laying out the tortillas. They did indeed fit, but the muffin tin was deeper than I expected. Turns out it’s not as much of an issue when you decide to layer sauce, cheese, more sauce, more cheese, and maybe even pepperoni, on top of each other.
My girlfriend then had the great idea to oil the edges of the tortillas, what would become the crust. The original idea was to prevent them from sticking to the muffin tin, but then she went one step further and suggested coating the edges in garlic salt.
Um, yes please?
By the time we finished preparations (it was a good thing I picked up extra cheese), the oven was ready to go. Our lilliputian Chicago-style deep dish pizzas were ready to cook for 10-15 minutes. This was the end result:
There’s no “during eating” photo, but you’re safe to assume it looked like something out of Shark Week
Yes, they were delicious. A bit too much sauce in the end, but they were tasty nonetheless. And yes, we ate all of them.
My brother recently asked me how I could eat things that I was nominally intolerant of (mostly dairy). I told him “the joy I get from eating these things far outweighs the pain they cause.” After a meal like this, I hope he can see why.
