California Pizza Kitchen For One Sicilian Pizza

Pizza is a food that is typically shared, whether it be with your family while watching Brink reruns on the Disney Channel or with your friends watching Billy Madison after vaporizing a half pound of weed. It’s cheap, filling, and one of the few foods that you have to eat with your hands in order to not look like a douchebag. The folks at the Kraft Foods company, however, have turned eating pizza into a more fanciful singles affair.

They recently launched their “For One” pizzas for their DiGiorno and California Pizza Kitchen lines, individual-sized pies made for your hectic lifestyle. According to their PR release, “consumers now have a reason to look forward to eating alone.”

Seriously − what the fuck? Now, I don’t really think that the people at CPK want to turn Americans into a group of misanthropic zombies eating alone in a giant auditorium like some strange existentialist painting from soviet Russia, but you have to admit that it sounds a bit creepy.

I was thinking that if this pizza is good enough to make me not want to eat with my loved ones, it must taste like some divine combination of ambrosia and the first fifteen seconds of Fruit Stripe gum. The box certainly looks promising − with interesting ingredients such as fontina cheese and spicy ham. At a mere 5.5 ounces, however, I was worried that it would be the pizza equivalent of a cock-tease.

My fears were alleviated upon consumption. While it is on the small side, it is adequate for a substantial lunch if you have a side salad to go along with it. The crust is super thin and crispy, perfect for piling on the meat toppings that actually taste like quality Italian sausages. It shouldn’t be surprising that a meat product actually tastes like it’s supposed to, but my mind has been ruined by 19 years of emulsified chicken. The Italian herb and cheese seasoning is a tad bit strong, but separates the flavor from other boring pizzas.

The box says it’s microwaveable, but believe me: no pizza, no matter how many gray discs and grid-lined cartons they cram in the package, is anything other than crap from the microwave. Stick with a toaster oven and your patience will be rewarded.

At $3.29, it is a bit on the pricey side, but it is a nice treat for yourself after all of those years stocking up on Celeste and Jeno’s every time they go on sale for $.89. You know what I’m talking about. So if you enjoy a quality frozen pizza, go ahead and give this a try and look forward to eating alone for the rest of your life!

(Nutritional Facts – 1 pizza – 450 calories, 200 calories from fat, 22 grams of fat, 8 grams of saturated fat, 1 gram of trans fat, 35 mg of cholesterol, 820mg sodium, 42 grams of carbs, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 4 grams of sugar, 21 grams of protein, 10% Vitamin A, 0% Vitamin C, 30% Calcium, and 8% Iron)

Item: California Pizza Kitchen For One Sicilian Pizza
Price: FREE (retails for $3.29)
Purchased at: From the nice CPK PR peeps
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Good quality meats compared to what you usually get in frozen pizzas. Thin crust is very crispy. Comes out perfectly after a few minutes in the toaster oven. You get to look forward to eating alone.
Cons: Pretty small, even for an individual pizza. Herb seasoning is a bit strong. Pricey for a frozen pizza. No pizza is ever microwaveable. Reruns of movies such as Brink and Smart House on the Disney Channel.

DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza

Phew. Thank goodness it’s over.

We decided to lift the self-imposed ban on food reviews here at the Impulsive Buy, because we would like to get rid of all these empty boxes and bottles of food products that we couldn’t review because of the stupid ban.

So that means food reviews up the wazoo for the next few weeks.

Also, sorry about yesterday’s “review.” We know it really wasn’t a “review.” We just wanted to be political like many other blogs, so we pretended to be interested in politics, like Ben Affleck does.

We know. We know. If all the other blogs jumped into a volcano, would we jump into the volcano too?

No we wouldn’t.

So we’re back to real reviews and the subject of today’s review was requested by Impulsive Buy groupie worshipper follower, Alisa.

She asked if we, in her own words, “review geniuses” could review the new DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza. After consulting with each other to determine if she did an adequate amount of sucking up, we decided to go though with the review and picked up the Three Meat Pizza version.

Just to let you know, microwave foods aren’t our best friends. From the exploding TV dinners to burnt microwave popcorn, we haven’t been successful whenever using the microwave. Oh, and let’s not forget the microwave pork grinds. Man, that smell lingered for days.

Although, we have to admit we’ve had some recent successes, like this one, but 99 percent of the time we screw up somehow.

Included with the DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza was a…Um…Crisping contraption, which we think is a black paint job and a few spikes away from being a S&M collar, but that might only be us.

After putting the pizza in the crisping contraption, we put all of that into the microwave and baked it for the recommended six minutes on HIGH. We wanted to watch it to see if the crust would rise, but we remembered what our moms said growing up, “If you stare into the microwave, your palms will grow hair.”

Or was that something else.

Anyway, we let the pizza sit for the few minutes after it was done baking. After tasting it, we have to say that this is the best microwave pizza we ever had that we didn’t screw up. It was like we baked it in a conventional oven and didn’t screw up.

The only major problem we had with it was the price. Spending $4.29 for a seven-inch pizza (don’t ask how we measured it) seemed a bit expensive. If they were on sale or cheaper, we would definitely buy them more often.

We wonder if Alisa will reimburse us.

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Item: DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza: Three Meat Pizza
Purchase Price: $4.29
Rating: 4 out of 5
Pros: Crisping contraption worked well. Oven baked taste. No, really, it had an oven baked taste. We didn’t cause it to burn, melt, or explode.
Cons: Outer crust was kind of hard. Expensive.