Pizzadillas

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I don’t want to talk about how I’m feeling this week, so I’m going to tell you how to make a pizzadilla.

This is not a culinary masterpiece, okay; it is not a serious inquiry into cuisine. It is just something that you can make in about 8 minutes, and when you eat it, you’ll feel that your life has been enhanced.

(I recently found out that my cholesterol is a little high again. We are not thinking about that right this moment. There are many things we are not thinking about right this moment. What we are thinking about right this moment is: Eating the pizzadilla, even though it is still a little too hot.)

Okay, so here’s what you need:

• 2 corn tortillas
• A handful of mozzarella, or three mozzarella pearls
• A handful of shredded parmesan
• A spoonful of jarred pizza sauce or jarred marinara sauce
• Seven pepperonis

First, you dilla. 2 corn tortillas go into a medium-hot skillet with mozz betwixt them. Slap a lid on it and go about your business for a minute or two while the cheese melts and the lower tortilla contracts. Then take the lid off and flip the dilla over.

Then you pizza. The key here is to focus on the midline of the dilla. You’ll want to spread things all over the surface of the dilla, but don’t do it, trust me. Just put a stripe of sauce, then cover that stripe with parm, then shingle the parm with a few slightly-overlapping rows of pepperonis.

Lid it for a couple of minutes, long enough to let the parm melt. 

Flip it again, so the toppings are against the hot skillet. 

Lid it for a couple of minutes. The hot skillet will fry the parm and pepperoni until they are Correct. As they fry, they’ll spread out to cover the surface of the dilla. (Thank you for trusting that it would work out in the end.)

That’s all you have to do. It will be too hot to eat for a while, but when has that ever stopped us? I hope you eat twenty of them and then take a big nap in a sunbeam. 

-gailey

PS - Since I can’t eat gluten, and corn tortillas lack the intrinsic structural integrity necessary to wrap up a hot dog without breaking, I usually eat hot dogs by making a quesadilla per the above (although with shredded cheddar jack instead of mozz), and then folding the dilla around the hot dog like a bun. This is, of course, a dilla-dog.

If you were having a particularly rough day, as are some of us who are writing this missive, you could, hypothetically, cook up a hot dog and wrap your pizzadilla around it, rendering it a pizzadilladog. 

Free will is a hell of a thing.

Currently Reading: What Kind Of Paradise by Janelle Brown

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

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A bear.

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Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

-gailey