Guys, Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies Really Aren’t That Difficult
Let me take you back in time a bit. It’s the year 1950. Truman is President, your only fear is Communism, and everyone has a bar in their living room. It was a simpler time. Maybe not necessarily a better time, since my main segue here involves the classic stereotype of the kitchen housewife. Obviously women’s rights weren’t exactly at the forefront of society at the time, but one thing they did right back then were the old standby dessert favorite, chocolate chip cookies. You could always count on mom, apron and oven mitts in hand, to bake you a batch of these on any given day, on a whim, whenever the hell. They’re easy to make and the closest thing to pure comfort existing in a physical state.
Fast forward, and it’s the ’90s. Everybody skateboards and wears sunglasses, and Princess Diana died or something. Everyone is too radical and busy to make chocolate chip cookies anymore. By now, Pillsbury, Toll House, and other baked goods companies have had pre-made cookie dough batches on shelves for some time now. While certainly convenient at first, the taste and texture lacks any freshness, and overall just feels rather generic.
Annnd now it’s the ’10s. Most people are fat, and Toll House recently invented one of the laziest cooking products in history: pre-made, pre-portioned, pre-cut chocolate chip cookie dough. Everything is done. You literally drop them on a tray and bake them. They go from package to your stupid fat mouth in 10 minutes. Slackers everywhere rejoice, for some reason!
Yup, this all looks totally legit homestyle.
Snack Report: Wholly Guacamole 100 Calorie Packs
Do you love avocados and guacamole as much as I do? Of course you do, they’re delicious! Avocados are great because they’re both tasty and good for you since they’re full of the good kind of fats as well as vitamins C, E, and K. The main downside to avocados (and therefore guacamole as well) is that they oxidize and get all brown and mushy super fast after being cut in to. That means you usually have to use all of an avocado at once, and finish guacamole fairly quickly after opening it. And sometimes, you just want a little bit. This is where the Wholly Guacamole 100 calorie packs come in.
Pizza Lab #7: Grilled Summer Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
So plants are blooming, the sun is shining, and old people are complaining about the weather. Ah, Summer in New York. With our entry into the month of July, we start that march onward into the hot part of season. Personally I’m a fan of seasons, so even when it’s hot during the Summer, I don’t have too much of a problem, as long as I have air conditioning to retreat to. With the beautiful weather comes an array of awesome outdoorsy activities that can only be enjoyed at this time of year, such as going in the pool, playing tennis, barbecuing, and many others. So to usher in the Fourth of July, and the official, unofficial-official start of Summer, we wanted to be timely for once, and go barbecue a pizza outside. We did not want to stay inside and go quietly into the night. We’re going to survive. We’re going to live on. Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.
(Incidentally, Erik once delivered that speech verbatim to a crowd of drunken party guests as his whiskey toast to the end of the world.)
Grilled Summer Pizza
Meg A. So it seems like we just did a Pizza Lab…
Erik S. You say it like it’s a problem.
Meg A. Well, no, I’m not complaining about eating delicious pizza obviously, haha.
Erik S. Good. That would be just plain silly.
Meg A. Well we decided to try and do them a bit more frequently during the summer when I don’t have soul crushing school work taking up all my time.
Erik S. Yeah, it’s for the best. And this pizza fits that theme perfectly since it’s a Summer pizza.
Meg A. That’s true, we did set out this time to make an obligatory Summer-themed pizza. This was another pizza that involved some brainstorming, since we started with just the broad concept of “a grilled pizza.”
Erik S. Fortunately that discussion went a little shorter than the Pretzel Pizza.
Meg A. Yeah. Since it’s us we knew there’d probably be chicken on it. And I wanted to put watermelon on it since watermelon is one of the classic summer foods. Oh and grilled watermelon is also a thing.
Erik S. It is indeed a thing haha.
Meg A. A thing we will probably never try again. Haha.
Erik S. Yeahhh… but hey, Pizza Lab is all about learning and science, and at the end of the day we learned that grilled watermelon tastes a lot like grilled zucchini. Which was pretty fuckin’ weird…
Pizza Lab #6: Pretzel Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
One of my favorite tags here is the crazy crossovers tag. It’s reserved for the delightful results of worlds colliding.. Unsurprisingly, Pizza Lab uses this tag everytime just because that’s really the basic gist of the column, pizza crossovers with other foods. This edition is no different, but to me feels like a true crossover because of the nature of the experiment. Some of the previous labs have been great, but weren’t particularly outlandish with regards to the foods involved. Our Pretzel Pizza in this Pizza Lab saw two classic snack foods combine in a way we didn’t think possible. We changed things up a bit, and it felt pretty special as far as pizza experiments go. The results were certainly worth it (after a ton of work).
Pretzel Pizza
Erik S. So this was our second dessert pizza that we’ve done. It was, what do they call it? A labor of love. Or no, an enormous pain in the asshole. That’s the term I was thinking of.
Meg A. Haha yeah…
Erik S. But my God was it worth it.
Meg A. Indeed. I wish it hadn’t been so much work so we might actually make it again. I was sad when I finished the last piece because I knew more than likely it wouldn’t be made again.
Erik S. Well, never say never… but yeah, let’s never make it again, haha.
Meg A. In fairness, if we always made our own dough this pizza wouldn’t have seemed like that much more work. But we’re lazy, so yeah.
Erik S. Well, if we made our own dough, we also wouldn’t have made it through six Pizza Labs.
Meg A. This is true.
Erik S. There’s a reason we buy our dough from pizzerias.
Meg A. Yes, because we’d rather spend $3 on pre-made dough than 3 hours on making our own.
Pizza Lab #5: Thanksgiving Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
A while back on a podcast me and my friends operated, we all joked around about making a pizza for Thanksgiving. No one took it seriously. Fast-forward six months and now that pie is a reality thanks to the magic of Pizza Lab. “But Erik!”, you say, “It’s totally the beginning of freaking Summer!” you say. My reply to that is simple. Turkey is good, and gravy is magical. We shouldn’t feel guilty about partaking in such delight. So perhaps that’s the greatest merit in designing a Thanksgiving pizza, it allows you to combine all the best foods of November into one place, and not have to feel bad about doing so. Oh wait no, the greatest merit of this pizza is that it tastes fucking amazing.
Thanksgiving Pizza
Erik S. I can’t say I’ve had an overwhelming number of truly great ideas for as long as I’ve lived, but for once in my life I came up with something I could truly be proud of. It’s gonna be hard for me to top Thanksgiving Pizza. Really. That’s it, I’ve peaked at the age of 24. …I had a good run I suppose.
Meg A. It’s still better than Olympic gymnasts who peak when they’re like, 10. You had a good extra decade on them.
Erik S. Joking aside, it was a very successful pizza to say the least.
Meg A. And a nice mid-year mini-Thanksgiving to hold us out ’til the real deal. Much like Christmas in July, I think Thanksgiving in May could become a thing.
Erik S. It’s interesting to think theoretically it was several months in the making, due to the fact it required turkey meat. Somehow it took at least two month for me to select a night on which I could actually make a turkey breast despite it not being rocket science.
Meg A. Yeah, I think we were originally going to do the Thanksgiving pizza before strawberry shortcake, but didn’t have the turkey?
Erik S. Well no, I already had one turkey breast in the freezer. That’s the kicker. Just somehow, cooking a turkey went from a random dinner selection to something I ended up having to plan a week in advance.
Meg A. Well, it finally got made, so that’s the important part.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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