Arugula Pizza

Now that our favorite spinach and kale pie is done and discontinued (still very sad about that), we don't really have a go-to convenient frozen dinner to take its place for busy nights, like nights we go grocery shopping. As a result, we've been trying new things, like frozen pizzas we've never tried before. I originally intended to pick up the new pepperoni pizza for dinner, but they were out. Plan B was this arugula pizza ($3.99), which is apparently imported from Italy.

The arugula pizza takes pizza dough and tops it with mozzarella cheese, cherry tomatoes, arugula, parmesan cheese, manchego cheese, provolone cheese, pecorino cheese, and a bunch of other seasonings. We had never had this as a sample before, but it sounded good. Also, I liked that it had actual tomatoes and arugula in it, instead of tomato sauce being the only "vegetable." (Remember when Congress declared pizza a vegetable because of tomato sauce?)

The pizza was very easy to make. They suggested putting it directly on the oven rack, but I've never really been that comfortable with that so we used our baking sheet and added a little extra time. Their recommendation for baking on the oven rack was 12 minutes if you wanted a crispier crunch. We probably did it for 15, since we like our pizza cheese a little bit browned.

We liked this pizza. The flavor was good. It crisped up nicely in the oven. It wasn't that expensive. It had vegetables. Good enough for us. Was it as good as actual restaurant pizza? No, but we weren't expecting that. We were pretty satisfied with the choice (especially when paired with a salad, more on that another time), and it reminded us that we used to buy frozen pizza a lot more back when we lived in Chicago. Not sure why we don't do that as much here, but maybe it was easier transporting the giant pizza boxes home when we drove to the grocery store there. Who knows. What we do know is that we have a lot more TJ's pizzas to try.

Buy again? Yes. We might try some other ones first so we can pick a favorite, but this was good.

Roltini

We were picking up some sandwich meat at Trader Joe's last weekend when we saw this Roltini on the shelf. It was one of a minority of products at the store that weren't part of TJ's private label collection, but we thought it looked interesting.

Product: Volpi Rotini - Mozzarella and Prosciutto Ham

Price: $1.29

Quick review: This looked like a stick of string cheese wrapped in a slice of prosciutto, and that's exactly what it was. The cheese was fine, seemed sort of like standard string cheese, but the prosciutto was a bit salty to us. If we were to buy a package of prosciutto and just wrap pieces around string cheese, it wouldn't be any different.

Buy again? No, not necessary for us. If we really want a snack like this, we'll just buy both elements separately. More versatile to have the separate ingredients too.

Escape to the Beach

We haven't posted in quite a while, but at least it was for a good reason and we weren't just being lazy. At the end of June, we took a nice relaxing vacation to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. There was sun and sand and beach and boardwalks, and we were pretty happy. Pretty soon after we returned, it was time for the long July 4th holiday weekend and hanging out with visiting family. Needless to say, we didn't spend too much time in front of our laptops.

We had a wonderful time in Delaware though, and we can't wait to tell you all about it. There was crab and scallops and lobster and fish and lots of fresh, local vegetables. We had heard Rehoboth Beach was a good place for people who love food, and we were pretty happy with what we found there. If all of that weren't enough, Rehoboth Beach is pretty close to Milton, home of Dogfish Head, so we indulged in quite a bit of that too. Recaps to come soon!