I'm not given much to bragging, so I hesitate to even say this, but I'm pretty sure I'm a genius.
I've read a lot about geniuses, which to me are people who conceive of things no one has ever thought of and make them a reality. Thomas Edison rarely slept, Nikola Tesla heard voices in his head, Ben Franklin...you know what, not going there. If you're reading this, you have access to the intrawebs and can Google it. The point is, their creativity is at such a level beyond that of average folks they have trouble turning it off and are deluged with ideas almost constantly. I recently came to know that burden myself. There I was, sitting in my living room, watching TV, minding my own dang business. I think I was watching some Cooking Channel show where a guy goes to fairs and carnivals and eats the outlandish, deep-fried, totally unhealthy but probably delicious foods they sell. You know, stuff like a chicken sandwich with two jelly doughnuts for a bun and deep-fried pudding (both are real, actual things you can buy at fairs). So, I guess maybe that planted the seed of unhealthy edible goodness in my head...or watered a seed that was already planted there. I already think about deliciously harmful food quite a bit already. For some reason, though, my mind veered toward some of the stuff people put on pizzas now. I'm sure you've seen cheeseburger pizzas, where they use hamburger meat, cheese that is atypical on pizzas (like cheddar) and onions as toppings. It kind of tastes like you're eating a cheeseburger. So I wondered what would happen and how it would taste if instead of crumbling up hamburger meat on a pizza, you actually made a hamburger patty and smooshed it between two bacon and onion pizzas. The pizza could kind of serve as the bun, the pizza sauce would somewhat replicate the ketchup and the cheese, onions and bacon lots of people already put on hamburgers would be invited to the party too. Maybe it's been done before, I don't know, but I've never heard of it if it has. So, I'm sure every mad scientist inventor goes through a couple of prototypes on any new creation. Things are rarely perfect the first time you do them, so you have to tweak and alter a bit. Even if you used smaller pizzas, you would have to make a gigantic burger patty to go between them. Otherwise, you've got lot of pizza around the edges and no meat. Each bite wouldn't contain the satisfying combination of both pizza and burger that I was imagining. So as I watched the guy on TV eat a hot beef sundae (really) I got an even better idea. Instead of trying a burger the first time around, I would use chicken. YES! I would make two pizzas and put a bunch of chicken tenders between them to create a chicken parm sandwich. It was the smartest idea to ever take up residence in my head. How would I take advantage of this, though? I mean, when you have a million-dollar idea you want, you know, that million dollars. Maybe I could open a stand at a fair, I thought. People would just go ape for this crazy, culinary cross-breeding. I shared this idea with a couple of friends. They thought it sounded good too, so they offered to participate. I didn't suspect the resulting dish would be bad...pizza is good and chicken is good, but you can never really know how something new is going to work, especially on the first go around. I bet Orville and Wilbur had to fling their asses off that sand dune a bunch of times before their fancy flying machine actually worked. Given that, I bought some ready-made pizza crusts and sauce. That's why I did that. Sure is. It isn't because I don't really know how to make pizza from scratch. HEAVENS NO! I'm a genius. Seems like you would have heard about that already. I actually can make sauce, but I didn't have all day to stand over a pot a-stirring, so I just heated up the pre-made sauce. I did doctor it up with Garlic Expressions salad dressing, oregano, pepper and onion powder. I then ladled it onto the crusts and added a generous helping of cheese. The pack of crusts I bought had four per pack, so I made four pizzas. Rich (one of the fellows helping with this) suggested that we make two of them as plain cheese pizzas and two pepperonis. Wow. Pepperoni would add a whole new layer of flavor. Genius inventors always have strange little assistants that get no credit for their contributions, right? Rich took the pack of chicken tenderloins I bought and pounded them very flat. Jed, the other assistant who won't share in the wealth my idea ultimately nets, breaded the chicken and baked it. Baking is a healthy way to go. I mean, birthing the bastard love baby of Colonel Sanders and Chef Boyardee is such an exercise in well-being and general wellness anyway, why not add to that experience? Once the pizzas were done, we pulled them out of the oven and let them cool a little. We then totally covered one of them in our chicken tenders, then took another pizza and put it (sauce and cheese side down) on top of that. It just sat there looking at us, oozing grease and melted cheese. We cut it into four pieces and all grabbed one. We agreed we'd all take a bite at the same time. Once we did, we all stood there for a second, but then I started jumping up-and-down. "I'm a blankity blanking genius!" I proclaimed. It was every bit as good as I thought it would be and then some. It essentially tasted like the best chicken parm sandwich I've ever eaten. The sauce, the cheese, the chicken and the crust all held hands and skipped merrily down the road together in perfect, euphoric harmony. It's been several weeks ago and the giant financial windfall I figured all us genius-types reap has yet to materialize. Until that happens, I guess I can just hope a few people will follow my lead and try this idea out. You'll see that it's delicious, but there will be no need to thank me. Knowing that I'm a food genius will be thanks enough.
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TravisI am Travis, the king 0f SC 1A Football Archives
November 2021
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