The Free Stuff Guest Blog You Never Knew You Needed

Hi. You might be thinking that you are reading Amanda's blog about her free Kroger stuff. Today, however, we have a guest blogger: me.

This episode of “Doing Stuff with Free Things” is brought to you by Payton, Amanda's husband, and by the letter “fire.”

The suggested recipes that came with our Kroger Promotion package included a pizza. A barbeque pizza. That's fine and all, but there's a boss little pizza place in town that sometimes serves loaded baked potato pizzas which will make your heart grow three sizes larger, and I just had a hankerin’ for one. The problem is, they only serve it one day a week, and you have to be The Flash or a Russian spy to be able to time it just right so that you can get one before they're gone. And I am neither.

Neither. Pay attention, NSA.

New problem: that pizza includes absolutely none of the free barbeque-in-a-bourbon-bottle that we got from the Kroger propaganda machine. But, have you ever been to a barbeque place and seen a barbeque baked potato? They're baked potatoes with barbeque. They look like this:

source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/shreveportbossier/5929724675

Genius! Brilliant! Tremendous! Amazing! The best idea in the history of pizzas, and believe me, no one knows more pizza history than my innards.

That best idea ever was quickly supplanted by a best-er idea in the whole history of evar - we have yet to use our pizza stone and paddle that we got for our grill!

Grilled barbeque potato pizza. You're welcome.

My wife's phone camera doesn't have a

scratch on the lens like mine does, so don't judge me.

We started this morning by putting a pork loin in a Crock-Pot with dang near all of that free barbecue sauce before we went to work. We work over 100 hours a week combined (no, really, that's not a joke), so real barbecue is out of the question.

Technically, this is a barbecue basted pork roast, and I only say that because one of my favorite people on the planet is a barbecue snob I mean expert who cares about the difference, and because I love him and hope he's reading this, I have taken a bit of joy from your reading experience, as well as from the pizza, because we now know that it isn't a true barbecue potato pizza. I hope you're happy, you foxy devil.

The next step was to stumble in the door from work, start coal for the grill (natural lump coal, of course), wash my hands, boil 3 ears of fresh sweet corn, slice some baby red skin unpeeled potatoes, put cornmeal on the pizza paddle, put a premade Kroger crispy thin crust on the paddle, top it with bottled white pizza sauce and a layer of sliced potatoes, carefully place the not barbeque around the potatoes without covering them as much as possible, remember that you were supposed to brush the crust with olive oil before all of that, and then remember that someone should take pictures while my wife naps after a bad day at work. All with an injured finger out of which I smashed the ever loving crap at work.

Here's my screwed up half done pizza prep

This next part will be controversial. The suggested recipe that Kroger's benevolent sales lords sent us had a barbeque pizza with corn on it. People say that's blasphemous, but I wanted to try it because it looked good and because YOLO.

I can always count on Grumpy Cat

for my monthly motivation.

So I cut the tasty bits of the corn off of its corn bones, and like the psychopath that I am, took a picture of the cornage to post on the internet.

Oh the humanity!

I put a bunch of corn on the pizza with the potatoes and the meat inspired by barbeque, as you can fuzzily see.

Scratch. On my phone camera lens.

Stop with the judging.

Seeing that I had made too much corn and sliced too many potatoes for the pizza, I put aluminum foil in my skillet which is both holey and holy unto the grill. I put the rest of the corn and potatoes in there with a knob of real butter and some Italian seasoning, because I'm so fancy, but you already know.

I just quoted who? Send halp.

Then I put shredded sharp cheddar on top and it was done. The fauxbeque potato pizza is ready to cook. Instead of a picture of that, here's a picture of our fattest and fluffiest cat eyeballing this pizza-in-progress as a fat cat is wont to do.

Poor decision drives initiated.

About a second and a half after taking his picture, that plump pet popped into the air like I've not seen him do in a long time. I promptly forgot to take a picture of the cheese on the pizza, and didn't remember until I noticed while making this post that the picture had come down with a bad case of the nonexistence.

But here's a picture of my fingers that I accidentally took as I recovered from saving the food in the nick of time, just like Batman.

Bat Fingers

I then took the comestibles outside to the grill, where the coals and pizza stone had been warming up. The stone is on one side of the grill, and the coal is on the other, because I was afraid that direct heat would heat the stone too quickly and make it explode like the comments section of a political Facebook post.

Really, I'm just making the rest of this process up as I go.

I move the stone over above the coals because I think that the grill’s internal temperature isn't hot enough for indirectly heating my barbeq-un potato pizza, and because I don't actually know what I'm doing. I slid the pizza off of the paddle onto the stone, which was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be thanks to the copious quantities of cornmeal mix I put on the paddle, and I put the holey holy grill skillet on the other side to be heated indirectly because it fit there, and because I don't actually know what I'm doing.

As I checked on their progress, I noticed that the pizza crust had begun to show a disliking for being cooked, while the skillet seemed to just be bored. So I made them swap seats.

One disgruntled pizza

No take backs, y'all.

At this point in the process, the food was done and my wife had just woken up. I slip the pizza paddle under the pizza with all the grace of an octopus falling from a tree, but nothing fell apart, so there's that. I pulled the foil with its contents out of the holey holy skillet of plus 2 to grilling checks, put it in a bowl, and brought it inside with the paddled pizza for my wonderful wife to take more pictures of us cutting, serving, and eating it all.

These were taken by Amanda,

and her captions may be more directly applicable

to the actual recipe than mine.

Yup. Looks just like the recipe, doesn't it? LOL

The non-ecue potato pizza was actually pretty dang good. The crust was definitely crispy - almost too crispy - but it was still enjoyable, and it held the pizza without flopping everywhere and losing the toppings. It would be better if we had made real barbecue, but as the poet once said, “AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FO' DAT!” However, the roast tasted sufficiently barbecue-y because that sauce did it's job and marinaded the crap out of that delicious pork loin. The white pizza sauce was a good choice, because barbecue sauce would overpowered the other flavors, and it was just a different kind of cheese to go with the potatoes.

I should have used all of the corn, because that flavor was lost more often than it was present. But when it was there, it really added a sweetness to the tangy meat and the savory potatoes. In its first run, this pizza tasted great, and some bites with all of the toppings in it showed that this recipe has potential. Not bad for a guy who pulled a hair brained idea out of his butt and gave it the old razzle dazzle.

I probably didn't use “The Old Razzle Dazzle” correctly, but I ran out of clever things to say.

WHY ARE YOU JUDGING ME?

Then there was only one thing left to do: relax with Kitty Buddy for some cuddles.