Pizza & (At Least Half A Game Of) The Lakers, Part 4, or Why I Hate Time Warner Cable

In keeping with the last three Lakers victories/pizza nights, I again made pizza last night. My friends Tracie, Kevin and Murph all came by to have some beers, eat some food and watch the game. And when I turned to the pre-game show I discovered that ABC was not coming in on my cable. Neither was NBC. But every other channel was working. I could watch the Angels game on FSN, I could watch Biography Channel, I could even watch the CBS evening news. But the Lakers game on ABC and the Stanley Cup on NBC would not work.

This has happened before a couple times, but for no more than a couple minutes, and when I re-set the box it would always fix the glitch. But not this time. Tracie called Time Warner and was on the phone with them for quite a while; their advice was a mix of "unplug the box and plug it back in" and "we have no freaking idea what to do." Very helpful.

Luckily, Kevin has forgotten more about technology than I have ever known. (Probably just this week.) After we tried various things throughout the first half, none of which worked, Kevin cleaned the cables and was able to find just the right way to plug the cable in directly to the tv to get the faintest image of a broadcast. It was not good and often the screen would split in two, creating two Kobe Bryants (or, much worse, two Luke Waltons) but at least I could kind of tell what was going on.

Anyway, I made three pizzas, all on Fresh & Easy dough. The first pizza I used pizza sauce, with a few splashes of barbecue sauce, some chicken I grilled, shredded mozzarella, chopped red onion, and cilantro. This was good but I wish I had chopped the chicken into smaller pieces and used more barbecue sauce. (My friend Zach told me he once made a pizza with Arby's sauce, which sounds fantastic, and if I ever take enough packets of the sauce I will be trying that.)

The second pizza is the one I have been making a lot recently: instead of pizza sauce I use some of my Sicilian chili oil, with caramelized balsamic onions and goat cheese. For the first time, I sprinkled chives all over the pizza, which was a nice addition.

The last pizza was simple but may have been the best of the bunch: roasted garlic, fresh mozzarella, and fresh basil. This was the only pizza I made that did not have any slices left over.

Alas, the Lakers lost, as I had expected them to, so I will not be making pizza for the next game. I had suspected that my pizza-making did not really have anything to do with their victories, and this was confirmation. It was fun while it lasted, and certainly healthier than 7 years ago when Zach and I were convinced that drinking Miller High Life and eating buckets of KFC popcorn chicken was the key to the Lakers success. Actually, they did win the title that year... maybe that will be my meal for the game Thursday night.