Anyone for Pizza?

I didn’t bring my lunch today, nor did I feel like going out. The food drawer at my cube is also empty seeing as how I ate my last pop tart for lunch yesterday. A friend of mine regularly plays trivia in the lunch room so I decided to take my chances with the wheel of death and play a little trivia.

The wheel of death is a vending machine that contains “fresh-ish” lunch type food – salads, sandwiches, square pizza, etc. It’s a frustrating machine.

Sometimes it takes your money, but doesn’t let you open the compartment door.

Sometimes I rotate the food I want to the door, but the machine decides otherwise and will spontaneously turn to some other random compartment (which is usually empty).

Other times, the dang door doesn’t open far enough. I got a salad last week and the door opened about four inches when there was a seven or eight inch salad container to get out.

That sucker was $2.75, there was no way I was letting that door close. The compartment was giving birth to the salad whether it wanted to or not. I yanked it out, slapped it’s bottom, and heard that newborn salad cry as I pulled off the crinkled-up lid.

Today, I decided to go for the square, elementary school pizza. When you put it in the microwave it gets all chewy. I decided I should give the toaster oven a whirl.

I’ve never used a toaster oven in my life.

And there were no instructions near by.

There was a button for pizza. Duh, let’s push that one.

Gee whiz! It started blinking at me. I stared back at it with a blank look on my face. Now what?

Another friend happened to be in the kitchen and came over to help. He had never used it before either, but he was kind enough to point out the “start” button.

I pushed the start button. A blue light came on, but the display continued to blink at me. So I pushed the start button again.

Everything turned off.

Like an idiot I went through this routine three more times. I finally let it blink just to see what happened.

Lo and behold, it started to warm up!

It continued to blink until it hit a desired temperature of 400 degrees, then switched over to timer mode. 20 minutes!!! I don’t cook a frozen pizza at home for that amount of time! It was at this point I realized we had frozen pizza for dinner last night. And my mother-in-law was bringing pizza over for dinner tonight. *sigh*

I pulled open the door after five minutes (the cheese was bubbling) and discovered there weren’t any pot holders or oven mitts around. It was 400 degrees, how the heck was I going to get it out of there?

I got a fork to slide it out onto a plate, but it was stuck to the little pan.

After I singed my knuckle, trying to work a plastic knife between the pizza and the pan, I got a wad of napkins to use as a pot holder.

By the time I extracted my pizza from the pan, the whole dealio had cooled off enough to use my hands. I made my way over to the trivia group, picked up my pizza, and discovered it was chewy.

Next time, I’ll just microwave it.

Silver Lining:

1. The pizza must have been somewhat fresh or I cooked it long enough because I haven’t shown any signs of food poisoning yet.

2. I won’t be craving pizza anytime soon. That’s better for the diet that I re-start every day because I failed the day before.