Welcome to America's Quest Kitchen
We're Putza-ing on the Ritz
Long have we at Quest Friends! dreamed of creating a themed cookbook—this is something we feel would be enjoyed by our fans and possibly even by randos who don’t care about the podcast but would like to eat food with a silly name. But, unfortunately, we just don’t have the skills to bring a themed cookbook to fruition.
Yet.
And hence we bring to you: America’s Quest Kitchen! Who says we need to know how to cook *before* creating a cookbook?
Join Hallie and Maya, two average people with middling kitchen skills, as we do our best to create food based on the sometimes-impossible nonsense made up on the Quest Friends! podcast. Whether the recipes are weird or basic, all will be an adventure, since we don’t know what we’re doing.
Although we’ll sometimes use existing recipes (which will be linked and credited) for inspiration and also for Basic Knowledge (see again: we don’t know what we’re doing), we’ll be adjusting as we go until we get original recipes we’re confident capture the vibes of whatever food we’re basing it off of. And that are, in most cases, edible.
How many tries it takes to get them to this edible stage is up in the air, especially for the weirder recipes (e.g.: Elee’s dead rat). But just about every attempt will be cataloged so that even if that attempt ends up gross, we’ll teach you what not to do, and you, dear reader, can laugh at us from the privacy of your own homes.
In fact, you can do that now! Hallie tried making “Putza on the Ritz,” which is mentioned in Chapter 4, “Afternoon, Day 1.” This is literally pizza, but a cracker—she started easy.
Putza on the Ritz
By: Hallie Koontz
Putza on the Ritz. Don't let the classy name fool you: much like the Prodigious itself, this recipe is nothing more than an effortful lie, a midnight snack with an unnecessary amount of steps added to it. For a Prodigious-sized version of the meal, try placing four next to each other and pretending they're one giant cracker!
ARI
I mean, it can be pretty tacky ship. Like there's some cafeterias that just have like three things all the time.
KYLE
Alright, it has these three things: For dinner, [the Prodigious] has chackin wings. It has putza on the ritz, and then it has salat.
All you really need for this recipe are Ritz crackers (trademark important, obviously), pizza sauce, and mozzarella cheese—but that felt really boring for an inaugural recipe even if I wanted that recipe to be easy, so I’m starting this off with some tomato sauce I threw together with stuff from my kitchen.
Here’s what the full recipe is based on:
Ritz Pizza Crackers or Make Them Gluten Free Glutino Pizza Crackers! (homemadelovely.com)
And here’s what I consulted when I was wondering whether it could be good to put vegetable broth in tomato sauce:
The Best Easy Pizza Sauce Recipe - Veggies Don't Bite (veggiesdontbite.com)
I started with 1 cup of broth and 2 tbsp of tomato paste (what’s the ideal ratio for that? I dunno) in a saucepan over medium heat. The picture at this stage looks a lot like underwhelming tomato soup, but in my defense, I hadn’t added literally anything else yet.
Once the tomato paste had fully dissolved, I added 1 tsp of Italian seasoning, which I honestly didn’t think would be enough until I had dumped it in. I didn’t take a picture of that stage for some reason, but let me tell you, a teaspoon is way more than you think it is. Then I added a dash of salt and pepper for good measure and took my first taste.
It was fine, but still too soupy. I decided to add a third tbsp of tomato paste to bring out more of a thicker, tomato-ey flavor. This was a good move, but it still wasn’t as thick as I wanted it to be. So I added ½ tbsp of butter.
I am told, after the fact, that butter is *not* a thickening agent. Next time I will use cornstarch, which is apparently what normal people use. But listen, that was all the way at the bottom of my pantry. Retrieving it would have been a Herculean task.
So the butter will not be invited back to the sauce. It’s not like it ruined anything, but since it’s not cornstarch, it didn’t do the thing I should have used cornstarch for. But again, guys: all the way at the bottom of my pantry. The butter was right there.
It was time to move on from the sauce (at least for this go-round) to the crackers themselves. Here’s a picture of plain Ritz crackers (I used one sleeve of the little Snack Stacks):
I know I just said the butter will not be invited back, but I decided to give it a chance with the crackers. I’ve baked saltines with butter before when I forgot to make a real appetizer for a family get-together and they were pretty good. I wanted kind of a “golden crust” type feel, so I spread some butter very Gracefully and Evenly on each cracker. Note: I did not spread to the edges—you know, the part most people would think of as constituting the “crust”—for some reason.
Then I dolloped some sauce on these suckers with a ladle that looks comically large in comparison to the little Ritz crackers.
I didn’t measure the amount of sauce per cracker—just ladled enough to cover the center. This was sloppy, so a lot of the sauce ran off the edges. Oh well.
At this point, I’d like everyone to appreciate how much these look like little Lunchables. “Glamorous Lunchable” is not what I originally thought of when describing Putza on the Ritz, but honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t.
For the toppings: I didn’t measure the cheese either. Just sprinkled some shredded mozzarella on top—whatever looked like it was going to melt into the right amount. I left some of the Putzas plain, put pepperoni on some, and topped the rest with spinach (each Putza was limited to one topping because I don’t think any more would fit).
The pepperoni looks really funny since it’s, like, the same size as the actual cracker, and the spinach leaves were just straight up too big, so I tore them into tinier pieces and layered them, like a little woodland mouse preparing a salad. These were also not the vibes I expected going into Putza on the Ritz, but I’m not complaining.
The recipe this is based on recommends baking at 350°F for 7 minutes, so that’s what I started with. But at 7 minutes, the cheese wasn’t bubbling or anything, so I let it go for 3 minutes more for an even 10 minutes. This time the cheese was sizzling, and you could smell the pepperoni—a good sign. Then I gave them another minute because that felt like the right thing to do.
The crackers looked a little dry, but let me tell you, that was deceiving as hell. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it when I scooped one up and it was soft. Like . . . almost wet. My guess is that, again, I should not have added the butter. Possibly spreading to the edges would have helped, but the butter just should not have been there. It’s double not invited back.
They don’t look amazing, I know. But my soggy Lunchables were pretty all right. I ate all of them in the picture and I didn’t get sick, so. Huzzah. We’ll just have to snazz these up a little.
The Actual Recipe
Prep Time: Beats me
Cook Time: Hallie didn’t tell me (Kyle’s writing this part)
Servings: How hungry are you feeling?
Calories per serving: No clue
Ingredients
Sauce (it will make like 1.5 cups which is so much more than you need)
1 cup veggie broth
3 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp Italian seasoning
Salt/pepper
½ tbsp butter
Other
14 Ritz crackers
An amount of shredded mozzarella cheese
Like 3 spinach leaves torn into smaller pieces
As many pepperonis as you want
Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Mix the vegetable broth and tomato paste in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir gently until the tomato paste has dissolved into the broth, then add the Italian seasoning and the salt and pepper (and, I guess, the butter). Stir to combine; once the sauce is . . . saucy, turn the heat off and let it sit.
Arrange the Ritz crackers on a baking sheet. Spread some butter on those suckers if you want to hate yourself. Then dollop some sauce on each one and cover with mozzarella cheese and toppings of your choice.
Bake in the oven you hopefully preheated for 10 minutes or until the cheese is bubbling. Enjoy until you don’t anymore.