My Attempt at Making A Homemade Pizza: A Life-Affirming Odyssey

In which I give you a PIZZA my mind…

I’ve never really given that much thought as to how important pizza is in my day-to-day life. To really illustrate the food’s significance, I went a full week without ingesting a single slice, and I seriously wondered how in the hell I was going to survive. As a peoples, we’re so dependent on pizza that it’s no longer a staple of our diets - rather, it’s more like the very binding that keeps our asses from starving.

Pizza, in a nutshell, is nature’s most perfect food. It’s the easiest, most cost-efficient means of getting all five food groups in a single meal, and it’s the kind of dish that can be endlessly altered and remixed to fit one’s desires. It’s readily available, it’s easy to store, it’s something EVERYBODY can eat (even those lowly vegans, pending you use some sort of whole-wheat bean-paste cheese alternative) and ultimately, it’s a food that’s almost impossible to mess up (as the worst pizza I’ve ever had, mind you, was still better than 75 percent of the things I’ve ever ingested.) Long story short; next to water, pizza is our species’ most vital substance, and an absolute prerequisite for any sort of social system that dare call itself a “democracy.”

You know, I’ve wanted to make my own pizza for quite awhile now. The thing is, it’s a lot harder finding decent, whole-wheat dough then you’d think, and it wasn’t until I stumbled across a certain hippie-vegetarian-indie-douche bag grocery store founded by Nazis that I found a tub of do-it-yourself pizza dough that I felt comfortable using as my base. And then, the accumulation of toppings DIDITH BEGIN.

Making a pizza is sort of like packing for vacation. You have an idea of everything you think you’re going to need, but at the end of the day, you just feel a need to cram as much stuff into your briefcase as possible. Granted, you may not KNOW why you might need a parka on that trip to Hawaii, but in case you do, it’s there. The same holds true for pizza, in a way; I’m not exactly sure why there’s a bucket of hummus and Whoppers on the ingredient list, but when the time arises…well, they’re there, I guess.

As you can see, there are quite a few ingredients at our disposal here. For all of you kids that like to recreate experiments at home, here’s an abridged list of all of the foodstuffs you will need to make your own Jimbo-style pizza:

THE ESSENTIALS

Pizza dough - as stated above, it’s a lot harder to find the good stuff than you’d think. At a certain juncture, you’re going to have to make the judgment call to choose standard flour dough or whole-wheat dough. The primary difference there? The whole-wheat stuff has a palpably sweeter taste, and it’s a LOT harder to roll than the regular material. More on that little issue, later.

Flour - because the dough just don’t magically turn itself into a flattened tortilla, you know

Olive oil - to glaze the dough at some point. You can elect to use virgin olive oil, or even extra-virgin olive oil - which I think is the kind of oil that’s never even kissed a boy yet - if you so choose. Personally, I prefer the standard (read: kinda’ slutty) oil myself.

So much cheese that you don’t know what to do with all of it - if you think you have enough cheese, trust me…you don’t. If it doesn’t hurt your arms to pick up your lode of dairy goods, then you need to haul your ass back to the local grocery store and pick up some more mozzarella.

Pizza sauce - really, anything unguent and red will work here. You can vouch for the spice-loaded, higher-priced sauce if you want, but honestly, you could pour a can of SpaghettiOs on your crust and nobody would really be able to tell the difference.

ELECTIVE MATERIALS

Banana peppers - adds a very rich, savory, and oddly, sweet texture to your cheese. An absolute must for all Greek-style, thin-crust pies.

Mushrooms - sliced portabellas will suffice, but I hear shitakes aren’t bad either.

Red onions - because white onions are just bullshit, that’s why.

Pineapples - the absolute greatest pizza topping of all-time, a statement I AM willing to go to war over if need be.

A whole tomato - so you can slice it up and put it on your pizza (and also because you can never have too much tomato in your life, ever.)

Tofurky branded Italian Sausage - for all of your vegetarian friends/liabilities. Chop it up in thin slivers, and you would never know it isn’t pepperoni. Well, until you taste it, anyway.

THE PROCESS

Step One - All right, you see that dough over there? Well, you’re going to have to break it open, roll it in flour, and shape it into something that looks like a circle. As a guy that took a Maymester astrophysics class while he had chickenpox, I can safely say this is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life. No joke, it took me almost twenty minutes to get this stuff even remotely resembling something with a circumference, and even then, my crust ended up looking more like a Ninja Turtle than something you’d order at Papa John’s. Needless to say, after making my own pizza, I have a newfound respect and appreciation for the talents of Pizza Hut employees the world over.

Step Two - Crack open the olive oil, grab yourself a brushing utensil, and glaze the hell out of your crust. Now’s also a good time to do some last minute quality assurance, so if there are any porous spots on your dough, now’s the time to smooth them over. After that, it’s time to douse the dough in pizza sauce. You’ll probably need a brush of some kind to make things all even, so if you still have the brush laying around from the olive oil glistening, you might as well dab it in the can and save yourself the extra dish washing time.

Step Three - Make it RAIN CHEESE. If you bought the shredded stuff, just open the bag and go to town, but remember: pizza elites ALWAYS shred their own. From there, it’s up to you as to how you build your pizza pyramid. As a general rule, I advise placing your heaviest ingredients on the pie first and working your way up with the lighter materials from there. As you can see, in my test run, I did the exact opposite, making my pie top heavy with synthetic sausage and pineapple chunks while the lighter weight ingredients resided next to the crust. It didn’t destroy the pizza by any means, but it did make the pie a little (OK, a LOT) less manageable had I done it the other way around.

Step Four - Whatever extra cheese you have laying around needs to get sprinkled atop whatever toppings are gleaming and jutting from the apex of your pie. At this point, you are just about ready to jam your pizza into the oven, but because we here at THE INTERNET IS IN AMERICA pride ourselves on maximizing consumer experiences, how about taking whatever leftover toppings you have and dumping them into a salad while you’re at it? Like the noble Hopi, we firmly believe in using EVERY part of the buffalo, even if that buffalo is sometimes actually a jar of peppers.

Step Five - Bake! While the dough’s wrapper said that our pizza only needed to go for about eleven minutes, I’m pretty sure we had to wait a good half hour until our pie was completely cooked and more solid than mushy. Perhaps you’ve noticed that pizza stone there - it’s not required for the course, but it makes things a lot more manageable than they would be if we were using a metal baking sheet. Also, if you want your pizza to have a “traditional” crust, you’re going to have to shape it into the pie yourself. Apparently, that shit doesn’t arise out of sheer metaphysics, much to my chagrin.

And now, the big reveal: whether or not my Jimbo-style pizza was actually worth a hoot. While it wasn’t necessarily the best pizza I’ve ever had, for a first run through, I didn’t think it was all that bad. I made a couple of rookie mistakes here in there, but overall, it was a pretty tasty pizza that had a very distinct, almost Greek-style taste (that is, a mixture of sweet and salty, with just a hint of spiciness to it.)

Yeah, it may not be Wolfgang Puck-quality or anything, but for a home-project, it wasn’t too shabby. That, and indirectly, it taught me five incredibly important life lessons in the process:

FIVE ASTOUNDING PARALLELS BETWEEN MAKING A PIZZA AND FINDING HAPPINESS IN LIFE

1.) The world is loaded with ingredients, and it’s up to you to pick and choose what spices your life. And sometimes, the unlikeliest combinations leads to the most astonishing outcomes.

2.) It pays to follow directions, but at the end of the day, all that really matter is what you were able to dream up.

3.) All cheese may look alike, but every individual block has a distinct flavor all its own.

4.) It’s way more fun to roll dough into flour and throw banana peppers at stuff with a friend than shredding mozzarella solo.

5.) Holy hell, are your results going to vary.

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My DORITOS LOCOS TACOS Review!

Is the limited time item destined for fast food greatness, or is it a high-concept idea better left in the dorm rooms of Southern Cal?

Earlier this month, Taco Bell made the decision to start selling its line of Doritos Locos Tacos - at one point, a popular, regional-only item in California - as a nationwide menu offering. And if you’re enjoying one of them right now, I think you owe me more than just a bit of gratitude for the opportunity to chow down on one.

Now, I’m not saying that this article I wrote last Thanksgiving was directly responsible for Taco Bell’s decision to “nationalize” the item, but…yeah, it probably was. And if they ever decide to make those beefy crunch, Frito’s-lined burritos a full-time offering? Yeah, you might as well send me a tithe every time you bite it into one from hereon out.

To be honest, the news that Taco Bell had nationalized the item was sort of a shock, as I didn’t know it was a countrywide project until seeing advertisements plastered outside my neighborhood Bell a few weeks ago. Imagine writing “I wish they still made Pepsi Clear” on a message board and ambling into a Safeway the next day and seeing a huge ass display for the discontinued beverage right next to the cash register, and I think that about equals the amount of surprise that coursed through my veins and brain tissue upon noting the myriad Locos Tacos posters and banners taped all around the neighborhood eatery.

I suppose explicating the appeal of the Doritos Locos Tacos may be a hard sell for some. If you’re American, however - and especially if you’re a college-aged male in your early to mid-20s - the majesty of such a menu item is basically inherent. For a couple of decades now, really, really stoned/drunk/fat/stoned, drunk and fat college kids have been creating all sorts of bastard amalgamations of junk food, cramming them together in bizarre permutations like Dr. Frankenstein, pending Dr. Frankenstein dropped out of med school to watch “Dragon Ball Z” re-runs for four years on a general education scholarship.

The Doritos Locos Taco Legend began, I suppose, in the dorm rooms of Southern California, where munchies-craving trust fund babies got a dual hankering for both microwaved tacos AND super-salty corn chips shaped like nachos, and lo and behold…history was made. The logistics of how the first Doritos Taco came about however, is something that still leaves me a bit puzzled. Granted, I’ve seen some pretty huge nacho chips in my day, but one would have to uncover at least two gargantuan, once-in-a-life-time, freakishly over-sized chips for the idea of a “Doritos Taco” to even become a feasible consideration. There HAS to be some amazing story there, I am most certain. 

Alas, I guess the really, really big picture behind the nationalization of the Doritos Locos Tacos is that it means corporate America has officially hopped on the Gen Y bandwagon and started catering/pandering to us like some straight up food pimps or something. I guess you can say that Taco Bell is on the cutting edge when it comes to incorporating “user generated” foods on its real-life menu, which isn’t too surprising, since Taco Bell is just about every dope-head and career slacker’s favorite fast food haunt by far. I suppose one could say that it’s cultural co-option of the pettiest kind - essentially, finding a way to turn a profit through LEGAL fusion of already incredibly unhealthy junk food - in effect here, but you know what I say to that? WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA, YOU COMMIE PINKO? Well, that, or it’s a pretty sound strategy, from a business standpoint. Since families these days are too dadgum broke to take the kids out  to eat (and all of those highfalutin, holier than thou neo-yuppies - think: your older brother and sister - avoid fast food because they’re all about veganism and freeganism and all that other post-Occupy nonsense that doesn’t mean anything to anybody), why not turn the DIY, hyper-ironic, food-obsessed youth culture into your target audience? They don’t have children, they haven’t declared bankruptcy (yet) and they really don’t give two inklings of a damn whether or not the high-fat, high-sodium gunk is going to turn them into footless dialysis users in 20 years time. All in all, I’d say that makes the Doritos Locos Tacos - a mishmash of corporate synergy AND pandering to the lowest common denominator (with a bit of youth exploitation thrown into the mix) - arguably the single most democratic thing a fast food business has ever done. 

As for the Doritos Locos Tacos themselves, you may be asking? Well, we actually get two models to choose from: a standard offering, and a supreme version. I guess the primary difference between the two - outside the fact that the supreme iteration will run you about 20 cents more than the regular variation - is that the supreme variety comes loaded with more veggies and sour cream. To some, this may be worth the extra quarter or so that they’re asking for, but in all honesty, it really doesn’t change the flavor or texture of the taco all that much. It’s a definite must-try mutation for completionists, but for the layman or laywoman, I’d advise saving those spare coins for laundry service or something.

To prove once and for all that God himself is opposed to the prospect of Doritos Locos Tacos being released, as soon as I got my bag of newfangled foodstuff home, the freaking electricity went out. Thankfully, daylights saving time was around to give me a little bit of light to do some fast food photography, which not at all masks the fact that I spent a recent evening stuck in my bedroom, eating awesomely gross food in pitch blackness like some sort of B-horror movie subject.

If you are an environmentalist or Eco-conscious person, the Doritos Locos Tacos are no-doubt going to horrify you. In addition to being wrapped in the typical Taco Bell cocoon of waxy paper, these babies also come wedged in a tougher, internal paper casing, which reminds you that, yes, you are indeed eating a Doritos Locos Taco.

You know, sometimes you can just TELL you’re looking at something that’s going to be revered by future generations. The same way New Coke came to “define” the consumer excesses of the Reagan Years, I’m pretty sure a good 10 or so years down the line, we’re going to be watching some special on VH1 with C-list celebrities talking about how amazingly stupid/amazingly great this thing was. Everything about this thing just screams “2012” to me, from the copious use of the term “awesomeness” on the package to the appearance of that now-ubiquitous phone scanner decal on the back of the lining. 

One of the things that STILL shakes me a bit about the item is why it’s called a “Doritos LOCOS Taco.” I’m not really sure why you would need to call it anything other than a “Doritos Taco,” but then again, it does have something of a nice alliteration to it. That, and perhaps it’s the company’s way of issuing the single most subtle mea culpa in business history - I guess what they’re REALLY saying is, to want to try one of these things, you’d pretty much HAVE to be crazy.

Empirically, the items really look like your typical, run of the mill hard shell offerings, until you catch that orange-gleam radiating off the taco. True to the namesake, these things are also guaranteed to give you a good case of the dreaded “Doritos fingers” syndrome, meaning that unless you eat this thing with a fork, you’re going to have orange dust all over your hands, your clothing, and most likely everything within ten feet of you once you’re finished with the meal.

So, the ultimate - and really, the only - question worth asking at this point is whether or not these things are actually any good. Admittedly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the items, primarily because I’m just not that big a fan of Doritos in general. As you can clearly see, you get A WHOLE LOT more stuff inside the shell with the supreme iteration, but don’t let your pupils fool you, because it tastes pretty much the same as the standard taco. While there is definitely a slight “Doritos” taste to the offering, it’s really a whole lot subtler than it probably should be, which is most likely a good thing - I suppose if they went ALL out and dusted the shit out of the shell with nacho powder, it would presumably be so overpowering and dry-mouth inducing that you’d have to dip your head into a bucket immediately afterward to avoid oral desiccation. 

To be honest, I do have some pretty weird culinary tastes. I mean, some really, really weird ones. That said, I think the Doritos Locos Tacos were a bit underwhelming, and something I really wouldn’t advise going out of your way to try…unless you’re like me, which means you hate money and owning a functioning colon.

But, of course…you’re going to try them. You have to, because alike me, you are hopelessly addicted to the tackiness of consumer culture, and since its relatively cheap, it’s a cost-effective means of quelling a night’s hunger pangs. That, and I really don’t think the national response for these things is going to be enough to warrant an encore, so if you want to give it a tryout, I’d surmise that now is probably your only opportunity to do so.

In other words? Yeah, we’re probably not looking at the next McRibwich - or hell, for that matter, the next Pumpkin Spice Latte - with this stuff right here.

In the mood for more fast food fury?

Check out my review of McDonald’s old school Halloween pails RIGHT HERE!

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Make Your Own Thai Pizza!

So, Who's Up For A Pie That May Or May Not Give You Extraordinary Knee Striking Capabilities? 

Before we talk about the many, many fine points of Thai Pizza (arguably the most delectable Franken-food I’ve yet to concoct), I think we need to address the Pinterest Revolution first.

I’ve always been the jealous type when it comes to people thinking up oh-so-obvious, multi-million dollar earning ideas. For example, have you ever seen those plastic spigots that you can snap onto an opened can of cola and sip like a bottled beverage? Well, the first time I saw that, I almost wept in the aisle. “Anybody could’ve thought of that,” was the comedy, “the fact I wasn’t that person that did” was the tragedy. Regarding Pinterest, I feel a comparable sorrow - anybody could have come up with a female-centric version of Reddit, but by golly, I just wasn’t that dreamer.

Pinterest is no doubt going to become a social phenomenon for years - perhaps even decades - to come. Forget YouTube, forget Facebook, forget Twitter, I think Pinterest is the only one of them that will have consistent value throughout the next 20 years. Whereas just about all of our other social networking sites have been targeted towards young males (even if older females made up the heaviest composition of users), Pinterest is the first major networking site I’ve stumbled across that caters specifically to a female audience - and not just a specific subset, I mean the entire female population of this planet. Since more females are being born AND outliving their male cohorts (not to mention that in the U.S., at least, females have purchasing power that FAR outweighs that of men), Pinterest’s long-term success is pretty much guaranteed, whereas the audience bases for stuff like Sherdog and IGN can only shrink as the gender gap widens.

In short; if you’re aiming for sustainability in this ever-changing world (wide web) in which we live, you better offer up some recipes and instructional arts and crafts projects. Or at the bare minimum, a sidebar with a link to wool wholesalers. I’m telling you, yarn is going to be worth its weight in gold if these trends continue…

…so, uh, yeah, what again? Oh, that’s right, Thai Pizza. I’ve got to say, this is perhaps the yummiest thing I’ve ever cooked up based on pure value of whimsy, and that INCLUDES a brownie graveyard (complete with Sour Patch Kids zombies) I made for last Halloween. It’s also the most preparation-heavy mega-food I’ve made this far, so bachelors, you might want to hold off on this project until you figure out how egg beaters work.

I really can’t tell you every ingredient that went into the recipe, so this photo will have to do you as far as making the peanut sauce base goes. Needless to say, you’re going to need some peanut butter (I’d go with creamy, but that’s just my inclination), some ginger sauce, some teriyaki and soy, some honey, and whatever that red stuff in the bottle is over there. Um, I’ll get back to you on that one in just a sec.

Once again, I really can’t give you a fixed amount regarding measurements and proportions and things of that nature, so let’s just reduce this equation by saying take all of the stuff I said before, throw it into a blender and hit puree for about a minute. The end result should look a lot like peanut butter, only more Southeast Asian looking. 

For once, I decided to actually make a pizza crust instead of just using a cheese pizza from Domino’s as the base for my pie, and I think that’s were this project went unpredictably right. Now, I’m no food dictator (a real Pol Kitchen Pot, have you), but I simply implore you to avoid a tomato base here - primarily because the peanut sauce (which, admittedly, looks a lot like Baconnaise when you first slather it on) really gels with both the crust and the veggies were about to heap on it, so…yeah. 

As far as veggies go, I’d say just get one of those mixed value baggies at Kroger and call it a day. As long as you have broccoli stems and something that kind of looks like snow peas in there, you are in good standing. And of course, just to make sure we cancel out any possible nutrients we may get out of the dish…

…it looks like it’s raining mozzarella in Bangkok right now. Set oven to 15 minutes at, um, hot degrees, and this is what you’ll be staring at in a good quarter hour: 

A lot of you will think I’m yanking your chain when I tell you that how delicious this is, but seriously, this stuff is phenomenal, and filling as all hell to boot. Normally, I’m a guy that, on a good day, can eat at least seventeen pizza slices in one sitting, but I was only able to muster two wedges of Thai Pie before falling over into a blissful food coma. There are local paramedics that can back me up on this one. In fact, several.

Admittedly, a lot of the food-crafts I’ve built over the last year have been made with very acquired tastes in mind. You’d have to be a very, very specific kind of person to even think of making a Pop-Tart sandwichwith seasonal Little Debbie snack cakes as the filling, let alone be one of those poor, contemptible souls that actually find such culinary abominations palatable. That said, this Thai Pizza is probably the first thing I’ve made that I would actually consider a legitimately great food mash-up, the kind of dish that is not only tasty as all hell, but something you might actually want to share with your friends and colleagues at some point. Heck, you might even manage to convince them that it was something fresh out of a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, and most folks would never be the wiser. 

The difficult part is in describing what the things tastes like. You’ll just have to take my word here and accept that it’s yummy, because I really can’t give you a one hundred percent accurate account of what it's like. Ultimately, the pie tastes more Thai than pizza, which is probably why I liked it so much; you really don’t feel like you’re eating pizza toppings as much you are a full fusion plate with each bite, and that, my amigos, is most definitely a good thing and then some.

All in all, there’s not much to say about Thai Pizza, other than the fact that it kicks all kinds of ass. In conclusion, it’s probably the 354^th best thing that’s ever happened to me, ranking mildly ahead of that time I found a copy of "Tecmo Super Bowl" on the original Game Boy at a thrift store for 89 cents and slightly behind that time I yelled “You suck!” at Michel Bolton when I saw him at the Georgia Dome, and he kind of acted like he heard me.

SUPER DUPER BONUS GOOD HAPPY FUN ACTIVITY TIME!

Your Friendly Neighborhood Jimbo’s Favorite Content-Relevant Food Jokes!

Q: What do you call a Thai Pizza-eating chicken?

A: A Bangcock! (get it, because Bangkok is the capital city of Thailand, thus making the joke an allusion to the city in question!)

Q: How many pieces of Thai Pizza can a Malay eat?

A: A Kuala Lumpur Two! (Because “Kuala Lumpur” sounds somewhat like “quite a lump or two!”)

Q: What does King Bhumibol Adulyade think about Thai Pizza?

A: It’s SUCHINDA good dish! (Because General Suchinda Krapayoon was the name of the general that seized power in Thailand in 1991 and killed a whole bunch of people!)

Q: What’s the difference between a Thai Pizza and a Tie Pizza?

A: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A TIE PIZZA, THEREFORE IT’S AN ABSURD POINT TO COMPARE SOMETHING THAT CLEARLY DOES EXIST WITH THAT WHICH IS HYPOTHETICAL.

Q: What do you call former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Mauricio “Shogun” Rua while he eats a Thai Pizza?

A: A MUY THAI SPECIALIST! Wait…that’s what you would call him even if he wasn’t eating Thai Pizza, I suppose. Uh, never mind then. 

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How to Make Taco Bell LASAGNA.

Who's Ready To Get All Mex-Italian Up in Here?

Burrito Pizzas.

Spaghetti Chili.

S’mores made out of nothing but seasonal snack cakes.

Is there really a visible cut-off limit for my culinary Franken-dish aspirations within sight?

This answer, we already know: not even close, bud.

The question, I suppose, isn’t so much how to create a lasagna dish made out of Taco Bell products, as much as it is why I would want to do such a thing in the first place. To help pass the food porn SLAPS test, the following is a brief list of the possible psychosocial reasons as to why I (and a lot of my contemporaries, perhaps?) have such a fondness/proclivity for designing such monumental food experiments as adults.
                                       

  The “Warhol-Duchamp” Hypothesis

As we live in a social system in which food resources are largely inexpensive and freely obtainable, such ostentatious food projects are in fact metaphors for consumer waste, over consumption and the general materialism of contemporary American culture. Our food experiments are actually symbolic critiques of commercialism and mass consumerism, with the food experiments themselves serving as post-post-modern, artistic protest.

The “Did You Ever See That Movie Angus?” Hypothesis

As children, we were either overweight and/or poor, and our proclivities for massive food projects is in fact a form of symbolic regression, a physical representation of our psychological scarring from being fat and/or economically disadvantaged in our youth. In this sense, the food experiments represent a psychical transference of our childhood traumas, which we symbolically triumph over via recreating and literally devouring them as dishes.

The “God is Dead But I’m Still Kind of Hungry” Hypothesis

As products of a post-religious world, we psychologically yearn for regimentation of some kind, which in this case, manifests itself in the ritualistic assembly and subsequent destruction of an arbitrary Eucharist. As modernity serves as our closest thing to a deity figure, the construction and ingestion of the caloric Christ represents a melding of body and culture, a fundamental mass in the form of mastication, digestion and ultimately, defecation.

Now, if you’re asking me which of the above hypotheses I’m buying, I’d have to say…none of the above. Why? Because technically, the idea for a Taco Bell lasagna was somebody else’s, and honestly, I’m just looking to post something worthy of trending on Pinterest.

But, as a social service (and because I really have nowhere else to post a half dozen photos of blurry, mashed-up burrito remnants), I’ll give you kids a run down of how to replicate my experiment, just in case you get a hankering for some fast food fusion at some point in the immediate future.

As far as Franken-foods go, this one is pretty simple to construct. The biggest question you’ll have to ask yourself going into the project is just what you want to use as the “lasagna” buffers for your plate. For my experiment, I went with three standard, hard shell tacos and three Beefy Crunch burritos (which, as we all can attest, really SHOULD be permanent menu items by now) in alternating rows of three - meaning, the first layer went taco-burrito-taco, while the next went burrito-taco-burrito. Depending on how large of a casserole dish you’re using, you could likely repeat this pattern ad infinitum - and yes, if you do manage to craft a dish with more than six layers, please send me photographic evidence PRONTO.

Considering the constraints of our dish size, I was only able to get two layers heaped on mine, which still gave me ample room to layer in at least one row of no-bake lasagna noodles. Obviously, you’re going to want to start by coating the bottom of the dish in tomato sauce, but from there, it’s up to your imagination. For the trial run, I started by placing one row of tacos directly on top of the sauce, sprinkling that with cheese and then laying down three or four lasagna sheets before starting the cycle all over again.

Of course, video evidence makes these sorts of things way easier to replicate, so here are two videos showing you the gist of the prep work for the dish.

As far as baking times go, I reckon the standard 50-60 minutes works just dandy for this one. So if you’re reading this from your shanty in the snows of Kilimanjaro, be prepared to wait awhile for your Taco Bell Lasagna to get nice and oozy.

The final product, I must say, looked a lot better than I expected. Even though we buried the thing in at least two bags of shredded cheese, the thing still looked more like an especially cheesy enchilada supper than it did any lasagna dish I’ve ever seen. Not that that is a bad thing in any regard - after all, why else bother making such a concoction to begin with?

As far as the taste of the dish - you know, the thing that’s ultimately the most important - I have to say it’s pretty good. Granted, it’s not exactly going to set the world on fire or anything like that, but it certainly didn’t taste like anarchy with a side of lettuce, either.

Clearly, the final dish ended up tasting more Mexican than Italian, and thanks to those Frito chips in the burritos, the thing took on this weird deep red hue that made the cheese turn an unnatural orange color. But, on the plus side, the stuff was remarkably simple to scoop up with a spatula…which is quite possibly the single most amazing thing I can say about the dish in its totality.

I think we need a couple of more videos detailing the intricacies of the completed meal, no? Oh, and pay real careful attention to that first one…if you listen carefully, you can actually hear the cheese bubbling.

So…Taco Bell Lasagna. Ultimately, I thought it was a pretty filling and mostly enjoyable dish, although it’s pretty apparent that this thing isn’t going to become a seasonal favorite at subsequent Internet is in America hootenannies.

Eh, she wasn’t a beauty, but she was all right; and if nothing else, it certainly laid out the blueprints for my inevitable chalupa casserole quite nicely…

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