Dear Mr. Boomerang

Historical note: This was the first entry in what I called “Sad Bachelor’s Dear Mr. Corporation COVID Thanksgiving Extravaganza 2020!” I was still married at the time, but my now-ex was in Colorado with her family, and I was alone (as were so many of us) so I celebrated Thanksgiving by buying a bunch of crappy frozen and boxed food that was vaguely Thanksgiving-themed and posting through it. If there was any event that cemented in my head that I should keep writing these letters, it was the response of my friends through that terrible holiday in a terrible year through the performance art project of eating crappy food and writing nastygrams for, like, eight straight hours.

Dear Mr. Boomerang,

In my ancestral homeland of New Jersey, no holiday table is complete without pepperoni bread. Sometimes it's homemade - you flatten pizza dough, cover in pepperoni and sometimes cheese, and then roll it up and bake it - and sometimes it's store bought. On this pandemic Thanksgiving, when I couldn't travel the 3000 miles to the homeland, I decided to start my Thanksgiving breakfast off with the closest thing I could find to that: one of your "Australian Inspired" pepperoni pot pies.

This thing thou hath wrought: it is not that.

You get points, at least, for using very few descriptive words on your box. I was expecting lies. Usually when a product has a crust that disintegrates and shatters everywhere, the packaging will say "flaky and delicious!" Kudos to you, sir: this terrible crust, which I'm sure is 70% butter and yet tastes completely fat free, and somehow tastes molded rather than rolled, and shattered and scattered everywhere when I cut into it -- yes, I know, I know, I'm supposed to "Eat like an Aussie! Try it handheld." -- you know what happens when you do that? I know exactly what was going to happen if I did that: the crust would have collapsed and the molten filling would have exploded all over my hand and face, and I would have had to go to the hospital with second degree burns. Is the Aussie inspiration the penchant for sending your customers to the emergency room? Anyway, I'm still scraping the crust from my teeth, but at least you didn't lie about it.

What's truly impressive here is this pie's density. It reminds me of a physics exam. There is no variation to this pie's texture or density anywhere. It is a Platonic gel of a pie. You describe your tomato sauce as a "traditional pizza sauce" and here's the first lie on the box: I'm pretty sure there's gelatin in this sauce, because tomato sauce just doesn't remain in a perfect unmoving state as it sits and cools. Oh, look at that! You were kind enough to tell us in the ingredients: gum. This "traditional" pizza sauce contains gum. Gum. OK Boomerang.

I will say that I believe you that this is Australian-inspired. When I think of Australia, I think of deadly things, disappointment, and drop bears. While this pie was sadly lacking in the last, it contained plenty of the first two.

Cheers, "mate."

Alex Parise

[Originally published 11/26/2020]