Are ice cream and frozen pizza staples at your house, or are they luxury items?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not talking about budgetary considerations here, just lifestyle choices.

Ice cream: Where I come from, a half-gallon of ice cream is a luxury item, to be consumed at a leisurely pace, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Ice cream comes again when you’re at the store and you remember to get some.

The Better Half, OTOH, isn’t happy unless he has two or three boxes of it in the freezer.

To him, it’s a staple; to me, it’s a special treat.

Frozen pizza: To me, this is the essential Emergency Supper/Saturday Lunch item. I’m feeding kids and they’re not picky about what it looks or tastes like. If it’s round and has red stuff and cheese on it, they’re happy. I’m always looking for what’s on sale, Tombstone, Jack’s, whatever, two-for-the-price-of-one, and I keep it around.

To the Better Half, however, frozen pizza is Special. He’s not happy unless it’s “Mrs. Fanelli’s Secret Family Recipe Bread Dough Self-Rising Pizza”, and when those appear in our freezer, it’s understood that they are “Dad’s pizzas” and are not to be casually consumed in front of the TV.

To me, it’s a staple; to him, it’s a special treat.

So, what’s it like at your house?

2

Frozen pizza is absolutely a staple in the Gundy household. I buy them by the cartful when they’re on sale, because sometimes the Dumpling of Joy goes into shock without a steady input of pizza, and $20 on delivered restaurant pizza isn’t always financially sound. There are currently three in the freezer - I usually have around five or so. Seriously.

Ice cream, on the other hand, is something I buy once in a while. We don’t eat if often - maybe once every couple of weeks, more so during the dog days of Chicago summer. Right now I have two cartons of it in the freeze, but that’s pretty rare.

3

Ice cream is a staple. For the children.

Pints of Ben & Jerry’s vanilla or Haagen Daz dulce de leche for my 5-year-old son, pints of Rice Dream strawberry for my ten-year-old daughter (who’s allergic to dairy). They both consider a bowl of ice cream between dinner and bedtime to be a Right granted by God Himself.

There’s usually a half-gallon of some cheaper, and low-fat, ice cream around for my wife, who may have some once or twice a week.

I’m not big on ice cream, or sweets in general. Occasionally I’ll sneak a little of my son’s. When I go up to New England I indulge in an occasional cone, because it’s all so good and homemade up there.

Frozen pizza? No way. We live in Brooklyn, where reasonably good pizza is available at least once a block.

A quick meal for the children is more likely to be a dish of pasta. (I keep leftover homemade sauces in the freezer.) Or a hamburger (I’ve taken to buying ground chuck in three-pound increments, making patties, seasoning and freezing them).

4

Neither.

Well maybe the right ice-cream is a nice treat.

Now as for chocolate, now that is both a luxury and essential.

5

Frozen Pizza: People keep telling me about this wonderful new advance in prepared foodstuffs. On many occasions they even insist that it is edible. When my favorite pizza parlor closes, I may even consider buying one for the first time in my entire life. Until then I subscribe to the motto that hangs on the wall at Cicero’s.

Pizza, like love, should be made fresh daily.
Ice Cream: Neither luxury nor staple be. Merely an excellent way to gain more pounds that I don’t already need.

Of course, for those of you with children, I fully understand how these might represent two of the fundamental food groups. I’ll leave you with the three basic food groups for the average American teenager:

[li]Hot Pizza[/li]
[li]Cold Pizza[/li]
Reheated Pizza

6

Recent college graduate and guy living alone checking in.

Frozen pizzas are a godsend. As I’ve determined to pay off my student loans before I retire, I’m trying to cut corners where possible – and the food budget is one very flexible budget. Every now and then, the grocery store near my home has cheap frozen pizzas, 5 for $10, and I’ll get fifteen to twenty of them. It feeds me for a month.

(It’s kind of scary when I check the nutritional information on frozen food to see how I can get the most calories for a dollar … but hey, my girlfriend feeds me, out of love, pity, or disgust. Any way you slice it, it’s still free food…)

7

Luxuries…albet frequent ones.
I’d like them to be staples, unfortunately neither my wallet nor my waistline agree.

8

Frozen pizza: Neither. At my house, it is considered the spawn of Satan. Real pizza (not Domino’s) is a luxury.

Ice cream: At the moment – luxury. But then, just about everything except plain spaghetti is unfortunately a luxury at the moment.

… Oh, OK, I lied. Microbrewed ale is considered a staple even under the direst of financial circumstances.

9

My kids don’t like frozen pizza, but I do have other frozen convenience foods that are staples in my home. You will almost always find frozen veggie nuggets, french fries, veggie breakfast sausage and bacon-like things, frozen corn and peas, and Trader Joe’s frozen goyza, curry wraps and pad thai bowls. Sometimes I just need to get dinner on the table in a hurry.

Ice cream is a staple for the kids, but a treat for us. In the summer I try, but always fail, to keep a supply of homemade popsicles and resort to store bought ones to keep up with demand. Now, there’s a waste of money.

10

Got some suggestions for me, Uke? I just moved to Brooklyn last summer. Grimaldi’s is already a favorite…

And to answer the OP, both are staples in my freezer.

11

My husband and daughter consider ice cream to be a staple. I can take it or leave it, and baby brother is too young to have a say at the moment.

Not exactly frozen pizza, but those Bobboli-type crusts are an “I’m too tired to cook” staple around our place. I used to make pizza from scratch. I used to make a lot of things from scratch, but not this year.

“Real” pizza from The Venetian is definitely a luxury. They don’t deliver, and getting some for dinner means one of us has to drive out and leave the other to wrestle Thing 1 and Thing 2 into bed.

12

I think we always have ice cream around, but it’s in flavors that I don’t like. As for frozen piza, recently we have always had a few boxes of pizza rolls in the freezer. Those things are really good.

13

I’m single, so I don’t have to stock up for the ‘oh shit, I forgot to feed the kids this week!’ emergencies. There’s a good pizza delivery/takeaway place two minutes walk from my house which I can afford, so I don’t do frozen. Not that all frozen pizzas are bad, its just that I can be eating a fresh one in the time it takes my oven to warm up. I think I’ve eaten ice cream once in the last twelve months, and that was under duress.

14

I often have ice cream in the freezer, but it’s a treat thing, not a staple. I like all kinds of flavours, but my partner only likes vanilla. ( ::sigh:: )

I very rarely have frozen pizza. Occasionally I have cravings for mass-produced food, and then I’ll have frozen pizza.

Mumtaz curries from the chiller cabinet, now that’s another story.

15

Ice cream used to be a staple, but my lactose intolerance has gotten worse, and I’m also in the midst of a lot of reconstructive dental work, and ice cream is too cold to eat without a lot of pain :frowning:

I don’t think I’ve bought frozen pizza in 2-3 years. #1 Son likes pizza rolls, but those aren’t staples either. Usually I make pizza from scratch. It takes about as long as a delivered one, and costs about 1/4 as much!

–tygre

16

Neither. I am watching what I eat, and the best way to resist temptation is simply not to buy bad foods.

What are staples in my house: chocolate sorbet, fat free pudding, Lean Cuisine and Weight Watcher frozen meals.

My luxury item is gelato. I’ll buy a small container of it every once in a while and only allow myself about two tablespoons a night.
Michi

17

I don’t know but I sure do like the el cheapo frozen pizzas. They just need some more cheese on them:) (conversely I like the more expensive pizzas less)

18

Oh, geez. I don’t know…I never really think of pizza as a “destination restaurant” thing. What neighborhood are you in?

In Park Slope, I usually rely on Pino’s, between First and Second on 7th Ave…Roma’s, between Union and Berkeley, is good, too, but they don’t deliver…Two Boots, on Second, is pretty good, especially the weird ones with Boudin and other Cajun things on them*.

There’s Tontonno’s in Coney Island, of course, which is often called the best in the five boroughs. And that place down under the Brooklyn Bridge, that changed its name a few times, dunno what they call themselves now, they’ve got a brick oven.

In any case, you can’t walk down a street in the Borough of Kings without passing a pizzeria every fifteen feet…it’s like hot dog stands in Chi. My advice is to try every one in your immediate area, and stake your claim.

  • Note to non-NYers: Two Boots (the owner has three restaurants, West Village, East Village, and the Slope) is so named because they do a cross-cuisine of Italian and Cajun/Creole. See, Italy and Louisiana both look like…get it? Huh? Get it?
19

I’ve always kept both in the house, especially when I was broke.

Either costs four times as much at a cafe, and I get my cafe time in for $1 nursing a coffee every morning.

20

Both are luxuries, mostly because I am a poor college student, and any food not stolen from the cafeteria is a “luxury.” Also I’m flirting with being vegan; I might eat dairy products if they’re around, but I don’t buy them myself. Vegan frozen pizza and ice cream is very very yummy, but also very very expensive.