Let them eat pizza

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Behold one of my homemade pizzas:


This one is piled with fresh mozzarella, sausage (original Bob Evan's from the tube, browned in advance), Mama Gallucci's pizza sauce and black olives on one half (the Goat detests olives and I love them). I use my trusty Panasonic bread machine to make the dough (2 1/4 cups bread flour, 1 t. salt, 1 1/2 t. olive oil, 3/4 cup water, 1 t. yeast)

Garlic press that looks like a speculum.

Sometimes I push a few cloves of garlic through my garlic press that looks like a speculum and let them soak in a bit of olive oil for a couple of hours. I add that to the Ma G's pizza sauce in order to make an extra-garlic version of my pie. Sometimes I buy extra-thin sliced Boar's Head sandwich pepperoni and cut it into sixths and cover the pie with the darling little triangle-shaped pieces, which will crisp up into some kind of serious heaven if you bake that mother proper in a reeeeeeally hot oven.

Yes, you always have to use a pizza stone, preheated for at least 30 minutes in a 500-degree oven. I use a pizza peel and a parchment paper trick to get the pie on and off that hot stone. There's probably stuff I'm forgetting, but tough luck. After all, it took me years to get this good at making pizza and you have to pay at least some of your own dues.

I am so enamored with my homemade pies that carry-out leaves me flat (except for the sheet pizza [authentic Italian style with a delicate sauce and not too much cheese] that they sell by the slice at the little Italian deli where I buy the Boar's Head pepperoni).

Hence, the usual joy that inflates most Americans when faced with the prospect of carry-out or delivery pizza is for me, well ... eh, no thanks.

So be it. Eat either too impatiently and the bubbling cheese will peel the skin from the roof of your mouth. For in every act, something is lost and something is gained. Droughts give way to floods. Wheat shimmers in the sun somewhere in between. A low animal roots in filth; a heifer lows in a meadow afar.

You chew; the slaughterhouse looms.

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