Thursday, June 5, 2008

Readers Response to: My Calzone

I read with interest and saw the mouth watering pictures of your Calzone. I thought your grandma would enjoy it so I went out to get the ingredients for your Calzone recipe. Now, please recognize that I am not Emeril, Julia Childs, Rachel Ray, or any of those otherfamous chefs / cooks. When I attempt a recipe, I do as I am told ( a trick I learned early in my marriage) and follow directions explicitly with no deviations, creativity, or second guessing ( another trick I learned). To my dismay, our nearest Win Co is clear over in Medford, a round trip of some 60 odd miles. At $4.05 a gallonfor regular fuel and my little truck getting approximately 18 miles per gallon, I determined that it would requireapproximately 3.3 gallons of fuel (presuming there were no construction delays, wrecks, or any other unforeseen reasons that the vehicle would be idle in traffic consuming additional fuel) to go get the flattened pizza dough.At $4.00 per gallon and 3.3 gallons (at the minimum), my cost for this trip would likely be about $13.499 cents, just rounded off, $13.50. So the package of flattened out pizza dough is shaking out to be pretty darn closeto costing me $16.50.
I determined that I could lessen the cost of the trip to Medford by purchasing the other ingredients at the same time. I had heard that Win Co was a pretty decent place to shop for ingredients to all sort of recipes and for snacks andsome general household products. I proceeded to load the items into my shopping cart and was pleased to find thatWin Co had everything I needed except the fresh tomatoes. Upon inquiry, I was told that a local Italian restaurant, the "Olive Garden", had been in earlier and bought every tomato they had. Another shopper volunteered that the"Olive Garden" was featuring Calzone that night and probably needed all the tomatoes they could locate. I finishedgathering the rest of the ingredients and proceeded to check out. I believe that I made a pretty good buy on the items, especiallysince I wasn't going to have to go traipsing all over to accumulate the various items. Other than the tomatoes, of course. I have listed the purchase price for each of the items, primarily so that I could keep a running "tab' on the cost to prepareyour Calzone recipe, which looked and sounded scrumptious! Feel free to review my list and offer comments.
Ingredients:
Pizza dough 3.00
Ricotta Cheese 4.29
Tomato Sauce 2.18
Onions 1.88
Spinach leaves 1.56
Pepperoni 7.29
Chicken Sausage 9.72
Mozzarella Cheese 5.29
Italian Seasoning 1.85
Keeping up with the "tab", I am now at $37.06 for the ingredients and $13.50 for my fuel for a preliminary cost of $50.56,and I still needed the tomatoes. Upon returning to Grants Pass I found that our Farmers Market, did have the required tomatoes. In fact they had their vine ripened tomatoes on sale, which really pleased me. I did some quick calculating ( in my head, as I did nothave a little hand held calculator handy) and determined that it would take me two trips to get the tomatoes as our little truck wasonly rated at one half ton load. Not wanting to be accused of being miserly, I just took it on the chin for the extra fuel expense because it is only about 5 miles to the Farmers Market, which meant it would only be 15 more miles. As you will remember, the little truck gets approximately 18 miles per gallon (without a capacity load), (we don't know what it gets when it so loaded, as the most we usually have is 8-10 sacks of steer manure, at the most).
Long story short, we bought the tomatoes (taking the two trips) and now are set to prepare our version of your Calzone. We did a quickcalculation (fortunately one of those little hand held calculators was handy) and came up with the following total cost involved:
Fuel $13.50
Win Co purchases $37.06
Tomatoes $3980.00
(2000 pounds (a ton) at $1.99 a pound)
Grand total $4030.56
We love you very much and we are always anxious to try out your new and exciting recipes. But.... please remember..... we are on social security and just can not be extravagant with our funds. In future would you please just not send us any recipes that require a ton of tomatoes. My stomach won't tolerate the acid and my wallet won't tolerate the expense!!! We still love you. Don't take this as being critical
Have a great day!!!
Papa and Grandma
PS .... regards those leftovers, we had enough to feed a small African nation!!!

No comments: