It's all downhill from here.

Last night, I had my first real No Dairy January challenge.  Like, the kind where I consider throwing in the towel.  It wasn't a craving; it wasn't a big, beautiful, FREE slice of cheesecake.  It was just dinner.

I was starving, John was starving, and we decided to save the pork chops for another night and order pizza. Don't analyze the logic here; I KNOW cooking the pork chops would have been faster than ordering pizza, but it felt right at the time.  Anyway, it took forever for me to negotiate the online ordering system, but eventually I ordered one of those meal deals where you get two medium pizzas and some other stuff, breadsticks, etc.  One medium pizza and breadsticks would have been fine for us, but of course, I couldn't eat the cheese, and John couldn't face pizza without cheese.  So, two mediums.

Long story short, the pizzas arrived and both had cheese.  The receipt read that both should have cheese.  The manager, when I called the store, told me that I'd ordered both pizzas with cheese.  Maybe that's true, but I made a serious effort to get one without cheese, and their order pages confused me, with all the flipping back and forth from one pizza to the other pizza and separate pages for toppings, sauce and cheese...I KNOW I clicked "no cheese" at least three times, but apparently I didn't click it at the RIGHT time, or I reloaded the page wrong, or something.  Whatever.  The manager was a little turd, and basically said he would make me a large pizza at full price, with full delivery charges, and that's it--and no, I can't have a medium, and no, I can't have the same deal as before, and...I gave up.

So I'm starving, with a whole, cheesy, extra-saucy, pepperoni-onion-green pepper pizza sitting in front of me.  It's perfect; I didn't even have to compromise and let John put mushrooms on it.  Even the breadsticks had little dots on them that John promised me were garlic, but I knew better.  I am a card-carrying Parmesan cheese lover, and I know Parmesan when I see it.

Of course I thought about eating it.  I also thought about making John eat pizza for lunch for the next week.  Finally, I picked off the cheese and all the toppings.  I'm sure there were a couple of tiny pieces baked onto the crust, but I made an effort to eat just saucy bread.  And I learned my lesson about ordering special-request pizzas through an online system.  I can't imagine a more difficult challenge during NDJ--for the rest of the month, when I'm faced with a dairy emergency, I can remind myself of the Pizza Incident.

Damn that turdly little pizza manager.  I should have asked him if he ever contemplates the life choices that led to his managing a pizza franchise at his age.