Pizza Pockets. I Love You.

One day I was discussing something or other with my friend Paul, and we somehow began reminiscing about things from our youth. We found out that there was a staple food that was very familiar to us both growing up… McCain Pizza Pockets! According to the website: “McCain Pizza Pockets… are baked, not fried, made with real cheese and contain no artificial colours or flavours. So you can feel good knowing your kids are eating a delicious snack made with wholesome ingredients”. It’s also a good source of fibre, apparently. And McCain is right. I do feel good about this.

Our parents had fed us pizza pockets as kids, but we hadn’t had one in forever. Obvio, we had to try these again, so I picked up a pack of eight during a recent trip to Superstore.  I went all out and chose the Deluxe kind- pepperoni, green and red peppers, mushrooms and real mozzarella cheese. Yes, the website says “real” in case there is speculation about its fake-ness. Just to be clear, these Pizza Pockets are not to be confused with the half-mooned-shape Pizza Pops. Oh no, those are completely different. The ones we wanted were the circular ones. Heavenly pizza filling in a round calzone-type shell. They tasted amazing back then, so of course they would taste great now!

I decided I’d store them in the freezer at my work kitchen for one of those Fridays when both Paul and I didn’t bring a lunch. That day was this past Friday. We removed the box from the freezer and both stared at it in excitement. This was legit.

We both remembered wrapping them in paper towels and putting them in the microwave for a couple of minutes. It turns out, these are the exact instructions on the box. We pushed ‘Start’ to zap our pizza pockets and waited slightly impatiently. Our dialogue went something like this:

Me: How do you know when they’re ready?

Paul: When it starts oozing out the side… *laughing*

Paul: How do you know when it’s hot enough?

Me: When you bite into it and burn your mouth… *laughing*

At that point, we removed them from the microwave and Paul bit into his pizza pocket. The melted cheese and steam burned his mouth… *laughter*. Of course, I kind of did the same. But once the initial temperature shock went away, the pizza pockets were just as we remembered. There were even parts of the outer shell that were kind of hard/crusty due to over-zapping in the microwave. Typical. So we stood there. At the work kitchen. Eating pizza pockets and re-living our youth. It was fantastic. With all of the retro-horror movie nights, talk of transformers with missing pieces, finding old Sony cassette-deck walkmans, and now eating pizza pockets, Paul and I are clearly going through a one-third-life crisis :S.