DiGiorno Thanksgiving Pizza

By Martin Peyruc

Hello readers, free spirit (or perhaps chaos demon) that I am, I’m jumping around the various yearend holidays, so I may end up doing things out of order, so if whim strikes me Halloween may be next, or perhaps I’ll jump straight to the next big holiday, Groundhog Day (I can’t be bothered to check the calendar.) I really hope I don’t have to eat a groundhog, I bet they repeat on you.

I thought long and hard (roughly ten minutes) on how to approach the subject of Thanksgiving, and while I could give the history of Thanksgiving, it’s been done so many times and done in greater detail than I could hope to achieve it would be pointless to rehash. I could write about Thanksgiving type harvest festivals in other parts of the world, but that sounds like a lot of research and work, and I am nothing if not exceptionally lazy. So instead, I’ll write about my (and probably your) favorite topic, myself and my relationship with Thanksgiving.

As all of you precious readers know, I wasn’t born in the States but have lived here most of my life. You are reading my biography, right? (Wait, do I have a biography?) To make matters more confusing, each generation of my maternal line (which I grew up with) has married someone from a different country and even though some were born American they didn’t grow up here. I’m not going to draw up a genealogical chart but let us just say I grew up with a mix of American, Italian, Colombian, and Argentine traditions (with a little English and German just in case anyone knew what was going on.) I frequently say that I’m an American right until I’m compared to an actual American. This really has come into focus since I married an actual American, Mayflower Club even (sorry ladies and gentlemen I’m off the market, I’ll give you a few moments to weep quietly.)

All this is a long way of saying I don’t have the same nostalgia factor that most Americans do for Thanksgiving. Sure, my family has done the traditional style feast, but no one is particularly attached to it. It all feels like we are doing a weird pantomime of what we think it’s supposed to look like. It also doesn’t take much arm twisting to replace it with other dishes like ham, lechon, beef wellington or really any big cut of meat and miscellaneous sides. I’m just going to come out and say it; I don’t like traditional Thanksgiving. Queue shocked faces and pearl clutching (and please don’t call ICE.)  Obviously, the giving thanks bit of it is fine, laudable in fact, but the food is the pits. Turkey is monstrous fowl (monstrously foul) noted for the white meat being dry and bland with the dark meat being slimy and earthy. People say the tryptophan in turkey that puts you to sleep but I think it’s because it is the most boring of proteins. The various root vegetables are cooked to mush (and sometimes intentionally mashed, lest anything have some structure to it). Green beans are frequently bitter, grassy, rancid smelling, and subject to a surprising amount of safety recalls. Nobody seems to know what to do with cranberries, they are either put out still in gelatinous cylinder form or some long cooked artisanal preparation that no one eats anyways. Stuffing, which for safety reasons is no longer stuffed into the fowl cavern, is ultimately pointless. All of which is supposed to be slathered in a viscous slime that is ever forming a skin as if it could escape its fate by evolving into something more mobile. Good gravy, indeed. Or rather not.

I’ve postponed the inevitable for long enough, it’s time to eat this beast. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this much dread before a review, but this is my job (note to self, see if I can get hazard pay) and it’s time to earn my nom de plume. Upon opening the cellophane, I was hit with the scent of wrongness. It didn’t smell spoiled, but cold and musty like walking into a long-forgotten shed is the middle of winter. Somewhere humans are not meant to tread. Baking made it worse; the tiny bits of frozen pizza detritus burned quite readily and filled the house with the scent of poor life choices. Finally, the timer beeped and with a heavy heart I pulled it from the oven. I have to admit, despite the smell, it’s quite pretty. You’d be hard pressed to design a more fitting autumn tableau. Golden crust, crimson cranberries, the fried onions a warm orange, cream colored turkey, and the verdant green beans adding a visual shock to keep it from all blending together on the field of snow-white cheese. Breathtaking (which is good, because the smell made me gag.) Thankfully once I sliced it up and transferred it to a clean plate (and threw out the supplied cooking pan) the smell faded enough that I was able to steel my nerves and actually eat.

Well, that was a poor life decision. Even without the smell, my stomach turned. I don’t mean metaphorically as in it made me sick. My literal guts physically turned inside my body as if they could tie themselves into knots in order to prevent this crime from entering. From deep within me came a noise not unlike an ancient radiator being forced into service long after it should have been retired. It is indeed less than the sum of its parts. The turkey while not dry is still bland. The fried onions which should have added crunch were still too soft. The gravy (in lieu of tomato sauce) in its purpose as unholy lubricant was not equal to its task. The cheese while not bad barely served as justification to call this a pizza. The biggest offender though was the green beans. They smelled bad, were mushy, and tasted bitter. Maybe if they could have been cooked separately there would be a better texture (or dare I dream, a better flavor), but that wouldn’t have fit the frozen pizza format. There were a couple of bright spots. DiGiorno’s deep dish pizza crust cooked wonderfully with a crispy outside and a fluffy but chewy inside. The biggest surprise though was how good the roasted dried cranberries turned out. The sweetness was perfectly balanced against the tartness. If I ever plan to add cranberries to a dish, I’ll definitely roast them ahead of time. It’s certainly not enough to save the dish (nothing really ever could) but at least I learned something. Yay, I guess?

Even if my poor innards hadn’t done their best impression of the Gordian Knot, there’s no way I can consume an entire pizza, so I press ganged my (very American) spouse into helping me eat this abomination. Whilst they also found it terrible, they held hope it could be redeemed and thought it needed more gravy (which blew my mind.) So, we dusted off our Puking Cat Gravy Bowl and doused the monster (I also added cat sound effects that WERE NOT appreciated.) I’m told that gravy can cover a multitude of sins, but there’s only so much salty slime can do.

Perhaps that’s my issue with Thanksgiving, it all ends up slimy. To quote Satre “Slime is the agony of water. It presents itself as a phenomenon in the process of becoming; it does not have the permanence within change that water has but, on the contrary, represents an accomplished break in a change of state. This fixed instability in the slimy discourages possession.” Or, you know, it’s icky. Thanksgiving will never be my favorite holiday (it ranks below Notary Public Day, November 7^th) but at least now I know that it could be so, so, so much worse.

Purchased at Wegman’s