The Periphery of the Mind

On the easy front, I offer you Digiorno's Ultimate Focaccia line of pizzas. I'll be blunt, I'm not a big fan of Digiorno's anymore. I find their pizzas to be somewhat bland. For a long time I was getting Frescheta's instead; comparable price but better flavor. But lately Frescheta has seemed fairly bland to me as well. I blame getting used to "exotic" restaurant pizzas actually. But I was in the mood for frozen pizza this week so I went ahead and tried a pepperoni Ultimate Focaccia and was actually pretty impressed. The crust had a very nice flavor to it, and the toppings were flavorful if just a bit sparse. Not great, but pretty good for store bought frozen pizza.

Two words of caution however: "hot" and "sodium". The pizza I had was liberally coated with crushed red pepper to the point that it almost overwhelmed the flavor of the rest. I suspect the toppings on this pizza are the same that Digiorno's uses for its regular pizzas, and the red pepper is there to help hide that. Secondly this thing is loaded in calories, but with it's lower fat and higher fiber it's actually healthier than a smaller (and more buttery) Tony's Pepperoni Pizza. Except for the sodium. This thing is loaded to the gills with salt. I don't remember tasting it, which is good, but if you're watching your salt intake you may be better passing this by.

And if you really like to control what you intake, but you're too lazy to make dough yourself, you might consider Pillsbury Pizza Dough. Having made pizza dough by hand (and killing a bread mixer in the process) I can't really sing the praises of this stuff enough. I may have mentioned it before with my stromboli recipie, but it deserves a second mention here. I recently tried a ground beef and black olive and sliced tomato pizza with an artichoke pesto sauce, and it wasn't bad. I think it's one of those dishes that if I charged $30 for, people would say was great, but if I charged $3 for, they'd say it was awful.

Not that I'm opening a eatery or anything.

Labels: cooking