Culinary Adventures with Bob and Al: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

No, this not that t-shirt, that talks about Texas Tech, A&M and Texas. Anyone remember that one? This is a chapter in Culinary Adventures with Bob and Al. Here we goooo..

The Good:

In February, Robert and I were invited to an Italian themed dinner party. We were making individual pizzas. I volunteered to bring the dessert and I thought it would be cute to bring a fruit pizza because it was easier than tiramisu and it still went with the theme. Little did I know that this would cause a movement, yes, the Fruit Pizza Renaissance has began in Dallas and cannot be stopped. I have now made this fruit pizza 4 times. People are requesting for it, begging for it, it is their lifeblood. Okay, maybe not. But, once you’ve had it, you want more. It’s good. Here was our last fruit pizza made for the season finale of LOST. Robert did all the fruit work, I couldn’t have done that. He is a fruit pizza artist.

 Here’s the recipe courtesy of www.tastykitchen.com

http://thepioneerwoman.com/tasty-kitchen/recipes/desserts/shortbread-fruit-pizza/

Without further ado, I now bring you…

The Bad and The Ugly:

In life, you win some and you lose some. Last Thursday, we lost.

We recently purchased the Bobby Flay grilling cookbook above and have been so pumped up to try some fun recipes on our little grill. We decided to try a cod filet with a honey citrus marinade and grapefruit orange relish paired with grilled sweet potato fries with a cranberry bourbon glaze. This took a trip to the grocery store and liquor store, a whole lot of chopping, zesting, boiling and finally grilling. We sat down to the finished product and the fish is fishy and the sweet potatoes were hard. Robert tried to bite the sweet potato and says, “these are raw”, then goes for the fish and says, “this isn’t good, should we go get a pizza?” THANK YOU GOD  was all I could think when he said that.  I had tasted the meal and I couldn’t have eaten it, but felt bad because we both put so much effort into it. So bad that I’d actually already choked down a whole sweet potato fry out of denial that this meal was, in fact, NOT good.

There's our bad meal, pre tasting it.

Into the trash goes our meal. It’s an accomplishment for me to finish a meal and to just throw it away is sort of sad. It’s like you’re admitting defeat, but there was no choice here, it was just BAD.

I suppose I can say it was a learning experience to ease my pain from losing. I learned that: a. I don’t like cod and b. bigger sweet potatoes need to be boiled and grilled longer than the recipe calls for.  Ppffffttttt.

This defeat also made me grateful I live in this century and decade, because guess who saved the day??

 $5 hot and fresh. You couldn’t run and pick up a pizza back in the day of the pioneer woman (not the blog, but the REAL pioneer woman – of course, those ladies did laundry by hand, and Lord only knows what else…I digress.) Onto my praises of Little Ceasar’s, though greasy and sort of ugly, it still allowed us to have an enjoyable meal, even though we are losers. Proving to us once more, we can’t judge a book by it’s cover. The cod was pretty, but bad and the pizza is sort of ugly, but delicious. Food for thought, right there.