Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Pizza, the magical food that is a separate food group.

You can put anything on it as a topping, you can eat it any time of day, hot or cold....magical!  Wash it down with pop, lemonade, beer, coffee, tea, milk, even yak blood makes a good beverage when eating pizza....magical!

So....why don't I like it?  I do like pizza; or perhaps most accurately I don't dislike it.  But I don't love it like some people.  Jerry, Bekke, and Val for example.  I think they could eat it morning, noon and night every day.

Let's dissect a pizza, shall we?
Crust:  thin and crispy, double dough, pan, rolled/stuffed crust chicago, new york, wood fired.

Sauce:  red or white, sweet or spicy, herby or not.

Toppings:  too many to list

Cheese:  any

Cooking method:  heat!  grill, oven, etc.

Sounds good, right?  Bread, sauce, meat, cheese=sandwich.

For me, I think it's finding the right blend of crust thickness, sauce spiciness, (don't like sweet sauce), the right toppings and not too much cheese.  (gets slimy)

Val got my half as meat lovers of supreme or something similar.  Her half was most likely ham and mushroom.  Tombstone it'd be hamburger.

Here's the thing.  It comes rocket hot, I always burn all the skin off the roof of my mouth.  It's messy....either some sauce squirts out or some grease from all that meat, or some cheese will slide off, or even the entire load of toppings will slide off onto my shirt.  Then I forget to treat the stain, and it gets set in the shirt and then I have to wear a stained shirt for the next 12 years.

I quit my first job at the Junction Cafe to work at Buddy's cafe, which is where Dell's cafe was...he put in a pizza oven and hired me to take the place of some dumb kid that was going to move to CA.  I took a 50cent/hour raise to be cook part of the time and wash dishes part of the time.  But the cheap bastard wouldn't put in a new water heater, so you couldn't wash the dishes quickly and get them all done, you had to kind of space them out so the water heater could keep up.  One week he tells me:  you're the best dude ever, learning all this...blah blah blah.  The next week he tells me:  we've got to let you go, you're putting too many toppings on the pizza.  And then I find out that dumb kid decided to not go to CA after all, and they liked him better.  It's ok, I didn't much like working there, either.

Maybe I'll tell you about my job during the summer of 87, working at the Sheridan Egg Co.  If you're lucky.

1 comment:

B00 said...

I read this yesterday from my phone and my sister and I laughed and laughed. I can't wait to hear your stories from Sheridan Egg. I can only imagine the stuff you saw there. Did you work there when the two guys got into it and one threw acid on the other? Geez!