We Make Our Own Pizza

Tonight's menu is pizza. We make our own. This does not entail pouring sauce from a jar onto a lilypad of premade dough. It's all from scratcheroo. If I sound like I'm both crowing and looking down my nose at you simultaneously, you may be right. As much as I love all of the varied types of commercial pizza out there, from high (wood-fired with prosciutto at a sit-down restaurant) to low (frozen Pizza For One), I can't bring myself to spend money on something that I know how to make myself for a fraction of the cost.

The mystical Pizza Knowledge was bestowed on me at a cooking class I took at Orange Tree Imports
before I had kids. The flour is a special high-gluten stuff from an Italian specialty store that makes the dough marvellously elastic and well-behaved. The sauce is straight 6-in-1 ground tomatoes from a can. I cook the end result on a scary-looking pizza stone that is splotched with the charred remains of Pizzas Past. The pies are always a bit misshapen, or as I call it, "rustic." I get tired of my own pizza sometimes but ordering in would feel like a deep, personal failure. This is probably something appropriately worked through in therapy.

On the horizon: homemade chocolate/peanut butter sandwich cookies; vegetable biryani; mushroom lasagna.