Thanksgiving Advent, Day Ten: Alternative Pizza Sauces

[swan_tower]

What? I never said all of the things I'm thankful for were going to be meaningful.

In this case, I am grateful for alternative pizza sauces. I am currently chowing down on a pizza crust that bears cheese, chicken, spinach, and pesto sauce. I could have had creamy garlic instead, and next time I may go for that. Mmmm, garlic.

Why am I thankful for this? Because when I lived in Bloomington, pizza was very nearly the only food you could get delivered.* And my friends and I gamed a lot, or watched movies, and the result was a whole lotta pizza ordering. Much to kniedzw's sadness (because he could eat pizza every night and be happy), after six years of this, I became so very tired of pizza that I almost never wanted to eat it. Three years on, I'm slowly regenerating my interest -- but that's helped a lot by restaurants that offer me greater variety in my choice of sauces. See, if it's got a non-tomato-based sauce, it's enough Not Like Pizza that I'm more willing to consider it. This, incidentally, makes not just me but my husband happier, and those are both good things.



*Except for Baked! And here I'm going to go on a tangent and talk about something I miss a great deal, and would be thankful for if somebody else would seize upon the WORLD'S BEST IDEA and make it available where I live.

Baked! was a restaurant that would, until about two or three in the morning, bake you custom-ordered cookies and deliver them to your door. Fresh. Hot. And you don't even have to get off the couch. You could choose your dough (sugar, chocolate, oatmeal), your fillings (chocolate chips, raisins, nuts, etc), a frosting if you wanted it. I adored sugar dough with dark chocolate chips, craisins, and walnuts. You had to order at least a dozen cookies total, I think, and the minimum for any given flavor combination was three -- but like that's a hardship.

And yeah, the name was no accident; the business was basically run for stoners, by stoners, and sometimes forty-five minutes after you placed your order you'd get a phone call from a spacey-sounding driver who couldn't find your house and turned out to be on the wrong side of town. But you know, that's a small price to pay for fresh cookie delivery. Why this has not taken over the world, I don't know.

Comments

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

I really, REALLY want to order Baked! now. Just because that concept kicks ass.

[time-shark.livejournal.com]

Checked yer e-mail lately?

[boojum42.livejournal.com]

Wow, Baked sounds a lot like a place called Insomnia Cookies that we used to have here. I miss that place!

[bookblather.livejournal.com]

Dude. DUDE. How was there no Baked! in my college town? Everyone smoked pot! Everyone! They could've cleaned up!

*grumpyface*

[rosefox]

Sounds like Insomnia Cookies on 8th Street (NYC).

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Funny, I had the opposite experience in Bloomington. Lots of pizza yeah, especially at After-Guild, but tons and tons of non-standard pizzas courtesy of Avers, and I'm a traditionalist. BBQ chicken, cream and crimson, some potato and artichoke thing a couple of Guilders came up with, I forget what else... simple tomato sauce and pepperoni or anything like it was scarce to non-existent, unless I made a fuss for paper reading or anime club planning meeting.

Funny thing was, when I did get my pizza in -- Italian sausage, garlic, extra tomato sauce[1] -- it was really popular, as in "I'm five minutes late and all my pizza is gone, waah". To be fair, I think cog sci paper reading kept ordering the BBQ chicken (always dried out) because the professor liked it.

[1] My parents pointed out that most places don't use enough, giving a monomolecular layer of sauce buried under like an inch of cheese. Mother Bear's was a pleasant exception.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I do miss the Cream & Crimson. And yeah, you could get lots of non-standard pizza there -- but that was rarely what people wanted to order.

[gollumgollum.livejournal.com]

I want you to know that i tried really, really hard to talk moonandserpent into opening the Bay Area Baked!.

And also, to mention that Baked!'s digs on Third Street had (have?) a)incredibly comfy couches, b)free wifi and c)a freaking milk bar. Surly and akashiver and i once spent, like, five hours there eating cookies and being internet nerds.

And also also, we once ordered cookies that came literally three hours later. Which is the downside of a business run by, for and of the stoners.

But god, i miss Baked!.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's true, that "forty-five minutes" above was rather optimistic.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In fact, if it doesn't have tomato sauce, it's not pizza. It may be really lovely flat bread food that I am perfectly willing to eat. But you are sick of pizza, so you have been having flat bread food: this makes sense.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It was actually our trip to Stacked in San Diego that made me decide to seek this out here. (And yeah, it isn't exactly pizza -- which is why I'm willing to consider it.)

[beccastareyes]

Ithaca has a place that delivers snack-type foods (including cookies) late. Never used them, but there's also a good selection of delivery food that I can even order over the internet -- college towns are great for that.

[teleidoplex]

You forgot the best part about Baked!, which was that you could get FRESH COLD MILK delivered with your fresh baked cookies. Whole, 2%, even non-fat if you were a weird sort of masochist.

I also miss Baked. They did a great peanut-butter dough with chocolate kiss half-melted on top cookie. Sigh.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You're right, I had forgotten. And also the peanut-butter dough.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I stopped eating pizza when I was a kid because the sauce was too spicy. It hurt to eat it. I've gotten used to it now and will even seek pizza out, but some is still too spicy for me.

My friend Angela lived in a place with a diner that delivered until at least three in the morning, located next to a really nice ice cream place. So you could order french fries and ice cream to your door at midnight.