So the leftover pizza gets wrapped up and thrown into the fridge and comes out the next day cold and stiff with no great way to reheat it. Frowny faces all around.

Well, let’s turn that frown upside down and then stuff it with leftover pizza, because I have discovered the secret to perfectly reheated pizza: Use a preheated cast iron skillet!

Well, it’s actually a combo microwave, cast iron skillet we got going on. Yeah, that’s right, I said “microwave” in reference to reheating pizza. But don’t run away just yet. Here’s how it works.

1. Preheat the Cast Iron Skillets.

I usually throw the skillets in the oven and turn the temperature up to about 425°. Why do this? Because we are going to eventually bake the pizza on the skillets in the oven and this will make for a perfectly crispy crust!

2. Preheat the pizza in the microwave.

Seriously, use the microwave for leftover pizza. Just a little though. We’re only going to warm up the pizza so it doesn’t have to be in the oven for all that long. Turn the microwave’s power down a notch, to something like 50% or 70% power and nuke it until the cheese starts to get a little melty on top; don’t go too crazy.

3. Throw the warmed pizza slices on the preheated skillet.

Here’s the secret ingredient, if you will. Your pizza is warm and the cheese is slightly melty. Your cast iron skillets are all hot and bothered. Throw the pizza on there and let it cook in the oven until they look ready to eat to your liking.

4. Take the pizza out of the oven and enjoy the heck out of it.

Just listen to that sizzle!

Everything is re-cooked to perfection: the crust is crispy, cheese is melted, the taste is hot and delicious. Reheated pizza just cannot get better than this.

Have any pizza reheating tips? Am I cray cray for thinking this is the way to do it? Shout about it in the comments.

PS – this pizza comes from Same Old Place in Jamaica Plain, which so far is the best New York Style pizza I have found in Boston.

Yesterday I asked if Kickass Cupcakes are really the best Boston has to offer, saying they just don’t stack up to Georgetown Cupcake.

Well, it turns out Georgetown Cupcake was already well aware of Boston’s cupcake tastiness gap:

Did you hear?? @GTownCupcake is coming to BOSTON! We'll be opening @ 83 Newbury St this Spring! Stay tuned for our Soho Grand Opening soon!

December 7, 2011 4:33 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@GTownCupcake

Georgetown Cupcake

I cannot wait! Maybe I should head over there and save my spot in line right now.

I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t it redundant to say a cupcake truck is ‘kickass.’ It’s a truck that serves cupcakes!!” True, but this was a truck owned and operated by Kickass Cupcakes of Somerville.

I saw a woman walking away from the truck, cupcake in hand, and I asked her if Kickass Cupcakes are any good. She laughed and responded, “They’re the best in Boston.”

Well, let me say this: if Kickass Cupcakes are the best Boston has to offer, then Beantown’s cupcake scene is hurting.

I didn’t always care about cupcakes. When the cupcake craze hit New York City I ignored it. Soon after, it arrived in Washington, DC (where I lived at the time) and I rolled my eyes. When a friend told me they wanted to wait in line for over 30 minutes to eat at Georgetown Cupcake I whined the whole time.

The whining stopped that day and forever after when I bit down into my first Georgetown Cupcake – Key Lime. The cream cheese icing blew me away, but so did the soft and moist cake. We ordered a half dozen cupcakes to share and they were all out of this world: Red Velvet, Chocolate Ganache…I can’t remember every flavor we tried but I do know that I loved them all. Everything was rich and full of flavor and seemed to melt in my mouth.

Since then I have tasted many supposedly great cupcakes and only been disappointed. Icings are usually too sugary with no distinct flavor. The actual cake part – roughly 75% of the food, and actually part of its name (!!!) – is almost always bland and dense.

Kickass Cupcakes, however, were different. They had fascinating ingredient combinations. Take the two cupcakes I tried:

Caramel Mochiatto – chocolate cupcake, caramel center and mocha frosting topped with chocolate covered espresso beans took things a step further by piling the toppings high.

S’Mores – graham cracker cupcake with chocolate ganache and a toasted vanilla bean marshmallow

There’s caramel baked into the cake just waiting to ooze out with every bite! I actually pulled a muscle trying to open my cakehole wide enough to eat all the S’Mores ingredients at once.

Unfortunately, the excitement only made the disappointment greater. The “graham cracker cupcake” tasted like a dry piece of cornbread. The “caramel center” was nice but the “mocha frosting” was really just generic sugar icing that there was so much of I hardly tasted the chocolate-covered espresso beans.

This was a life lesson in food eating: Don’t get distracted by ingredients piled high. More is not always better when it comes to food. If that were the case an 18-topping stuffed crust Pizza Hut pie would be the measuring stick by which all pizzas are judged.

So tell me, Boston:
- Are Kickass Cupcakes the best in Boston? If so, tell me which cupcake I need to eat.
- Is there a simple but delicious cupcake to be found elsewhere in Boston?
- Or do cupcakes in Boston just suck and I should give up my search now?

photo by Dinner Series via Flickr

UPDATE: Boston cupcake makers are about to get learned. Georgetown Cupcake is coming to Boston in the Spring, opening a shop on Newbury Street.

Did you hear?? @GTownCupcake is coming to BOSTON! We'll be opening @ 83 Newbury St this Spring! Stay tuned for our Soho Grand Opening soon!

December 7, 2011 4:33 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@GTownCupcake

Georgetown Cupcake

Should I go start waiting in line now?

I had to be able to make my own version at home.

Step 1: Infuse the vodka with jalapeños.
I looked up a few recipes online but decided to mostly just listen to the Bella Luna Milky Way bar tender’s advice: slice up some jalapeños and let it sit in the vodka for 24 hours. Easy enough. I went with Absolut vodka mostly because it comes in a clear glass bottle that would makes for easy viewing of the jalapeños. (oooh, pretty)

I sliced the jalapeños length-wise and squeezed them through the neck of the Absolut. Then I let the bottle sit in a dark cabinet for 24 hours, shaking the mixture whenever I remembered. My randomly-chosen ratio was 3 sliced jalapeños to 1 liter of vodka.

Step 2: Mix Your Drink
I didn’t really have all of his exact ingredients so I decided to improvise. Instead of “cherry peppers” – whatever those are – I picked up a jar of Peppadew Peppers. Why? Because they looked like what the bar tender had used and I happen to run across them in Whole Foods. I don’t have any Simple Syrup pre-made so I just used a dash of sugar. And I wanted a little extra sourness so I used a combination of a muddled lime, lime juice and Rose’s Lime Juice.

Final mixture:

•  3-4 oz. of homemade jalapeño-infused vodka
• 1 oz. lime juice
• 1 oz. Rose’s Lime Juice
• Large slice of lime
• Dash of sugar

Muddle the lime in the above mixture. Add ice. Shake turbulently.

Before you pour the mixture into a martini glass, add a large drop of the Peppadew juice straight from the jar. Throw in one whole Peppadew, mostly for aesthetics. Pour into the glass.

Step 3: Enjoy your spicy concoction.

Damn, that’s one spicy meatball!

That’s how I end up eating a bag of chips labeled as “Funky Fusion” flavor, having no idea what, exactly, is being fused in a funky manner. You had me at New Flavor!, “Dirty” Potato Chips:

For the record, I taste tomato and BBQ but the ingredients list hints at paprikia, tumeric and “natural smoke flavor.”

Update: After gobbling down the whole bag I realize there is a lot of vinegar in there too. It’s like a BBQ-vinegar fusion. In short: it’s tasty. The “Dirty” Potato Chip people have to give this a better name and take the chip world over!

I hope I am not being too bold in making my own flavor name suggestion, but perhaps Carolina BBQ is fitting.

But he doesn’t specify which flavor of Pringles can to choose. Oh no! So how do you decide?

“My siblings and I briefly debated what flavor to use. But I said, ‘Look we need to use the original.’”

How can a decision be so practical and also so hilarious?

Making this anecdote even better: this can of Pringles was picked up by the siblings at a Walgreen’s on their way to the funeral home.

(h/t: SteveReads)

A box of Shredded Wheat showed up in our house recently and, I’ll be honest, it confused me. I opened the lid, peaked in, and saw a bunch of paper wrapping. What kind of cereal comes in individually wrapped containers? Only Original Shredded Wheat, my friends!

What do you do with these things? Are they for napping?

Well, maybe they’d make for a good travel pillow, but something just didn’t feel right. So I put them in a bowl.

THEY JUST BARELY FIT IN A BOWL?! WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE? WHAT KIND OF CEREAL DOESN’T FIT IN A DANG BOWL? I don’t care if it was invented 100 years ago! Bowls existed then!

Eventually I just gave in, covered them in milk and chopped them up with my spoon.

And they were pretty delicious. How can something so delicious contain nothing but whole grain wheat? They “put the ‘no’ in innovation,” indeed! But maybe next time we can get it in spoon size.

So you’d think when McDonald’s created one of the most addictive food jingles in the history of television for their Filet-o-Fish sandwich I’d be rushing off to Mickey D’s every day to scarf down a fried fish-like substance in a sandwich.

But I’m not. I have no desire to eat a Filet-o-Fish even as I sing that damn song all day.

Sadly, I think this says more about the awfulness of the Filet-o-Fish than it does about me. Because if next week McDonald’s starts advertising how they have completely changed their Filet-o-Fish to make it better, and especially if they tell me that in a catchy jingle, I’ll be queued up at McDonald’s almost immediately. I’d feel slightly ashamed, but  I know I’d still be there nonetheless.

Watch me eat an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting! And for my next trick, I’ll text you while I’m in the bathroom for the next 6 hours! (click above to see the enthralling flickr photo set).

PS – future pint eating endeavors would be made way easier with a handy ice cream “pint sleeve”. The paper towel I wrapped around the pint container just wasn’t cutting it by the end.

If you join me at lunch, I will make you one too.