Pleased to Pizza

For me there is no more perfect food than pizza.  It is bread, dairy, vegetable and often meat.  There are even those that might go so far as to put fruit on theirs.  It is easy to find in every town and available in many varieties from your grocery store.  It is economical and in many places you can even have it delivered to your door.  It can be eaten at any meal (and yes I will definitely have it for breakfast) and it is one of those foods than even when it isn’t great, it’s still good.

I have always liked pizza in its many forms.  Growing up, we had pizza every Friday for school lunch.  This would be one of those times where it wasn’t great but still better than the choices most days of the week.  My mother also made pizza often at home, usually using a store bought par-baked crust or a boxed mix.  Again, not as good as going to a pizzeria but still good enough.

My generation and younger have probably never known a time without so many pizza choices but my mother can tell me about the first time she had a pizza.  It was an event.  The fact that pizza has not been common throughout the United States for any longer than my mother’s generation makes its dominance now more amazing.  We now have television shows dedicated to finding the best pizza in America, debates about thin crust versus thick, Chicago style versus New York, pizza commercials on every channel and pizza joints in every town.

Pizza changed for me in some ways when I learned to make my own.  I was in college earning my bachelor’s degree and living in a with a kitchen area.  I made my own dough but used a jar sauce.  I patted out my dough onto a large sheet pan, slathered it with sauce, laid down a full layer of thinly sliced pepperoni and covered it all with cheese before adding a few more pepperoni to the top.  It was the best pizza I ever ate.  Foods usually are when you take the time to do them yourself not just because of the quality of what you put in but the time you have invested.

I have worked on my pizza perfection over the years.  I enhanced my dough with a garlic-flavored olive oil I discovered when I was in California.  I figured out how to make my own sauce.  I came up my preferred cheese ratio; it takes more than just mozzarella.  I bought perforated pizza pans and a pizza stone.  I don’t use them both at once but the pans are easier sometimes even though the stone imparts a really nice bottom crust you can’t get any other way.

I get great satisfaction from the process of making a pizza.  I have my hands on the dough as I knead it and then let it rest.  I get to stretch it out and decide whether I want the crust a little thicker or thinner.  I have my choice in every ingredient and topping.  And I get to have extra cheese that really seems like extra cheese, I never get enough when I order one out.  Pizza is, of course, not on any low-carb, low-fat or low-anything-else diets but I will never get it completely out of mine.

Dragon Wings and French Fryes

There is more than one time of year that makes my taste buds start to stand at notice.  One of these is when the turning leaves signal that it’s time to start cooking all those hearty soups and stews and baking warm apple pies and pumpkin specialties.  It is a time for cider and donuts at the local Cider Mill as well as hot dogs and hot coffee along side of the local high school football field.  It is also the time of the year when there are Renaissance Faires in my area, bringing a whole other set of interesting food choices.

Growing up, whenever we had a carved turkey, the dark meat (specifically the leg) was always the last thing to go but when you go to a Renaissance Faire suddenly this is a food to covet.  It just seems right.  There is something appealing about any food you can eat at the Faire that doesn’t require utensils.  And I think there is something very primeval in our nature that yearns for an excuse to eat food like a caveman.  Hence there is many meats sold on a stick in addition to the turkey leg.

           

The food at the Renaissance Festivals varies a lot and can be anything from great to ordinary.  You can usually find one of my favorites, the bread bowl, but sometimes the soup inside is something from a can and other times it is really good homemade chowder.  It is a gamble the first time you order it but if it is good you can count on coming back for more next year.

           

More often than not, the food that is served at the Faire is just a normal item with a Renaissance name.  I can understand this, after all they cater greatly to the family crowd and most children are not adventurous with their food.  They want pizza and chicken fingers.  They do not really care if you call their wings “dragon wings” and their fries “French Fryes” but those of us adults that attend appreciate at least pretending that these things might have been available in merry old England.  Of course, Ye’ Olde in front of any food makes it authentic period fare.

One of my favorite items at a Faire I often go to is Jester Chips.  Jester Chips are a long, thin, spiral cut potato fried crispy like a potato chip and although I have seen them elsewhere they are hard to find so I indulge when I can.  I like to get those items that you can’t find everywhere to make the experience seem more special.  At a couple of the Faires I have attended they have a theme food item sold through out the land.  I have not been able to figure out the historical significance of the giant deli size pickle but you can get them at the Faire.  I will have to check with a culinary anthropologist on that but my guess is that pickling would have been a popular form of preservation in times when refrigeration was not prevalent.  That’s my answer anyway and I’m sticking to it.  But, I never saw anyone in a Shakespeare play chomping on a fat deli pickle.

Historically, again I need my culinary anthropologist, I suspect the bulk of what they ate on a regular basis in the Renaissance times would be quite unpalatable to our modern day tastes.  I suppose it wouldn’t earn the Ren Faire people much return business but in Ye’ Olde days they ate a lot of foods that were near rancid and would certainly never turn down a piece of stale bread.  They did not have that luxury.  I wonder sometimes with the economy being what it is currently if we might soon not have that luxury either.

Half Your Chicken and Eat It Too

There are many kinds of barbecue, Kansas City style, South Carolina, Memphis.  The list could go on and on.  And all of the big barbecue authorities will tell you that what we do in our backyard on Memorial Day is grilling and not barbecue.  I am not writing this to argue any of those points.  I have already talked about my rural upbringing but you have to realize that where I grew up there was not a lot of restaurant choices and even fewer that were within my parents’ budget.  So growing up there was only one barbecue, Brooks’ House of BBQ.  And there was only one thing I ever ordered there, half chicken.

Brooks’ cooks their chickens over a large pit outside of the main restaurant and you can smell the food from the highway even if you aren’t planning to stop for dinner.  There isn’t a gooey barbecue sauce on the chicken, just a marinade that is be basted on the chicken halves as they are flipped over the coals, roasting until there are charred black flecks of flavor clinging to ever bit of the chicken skin.

We were semi-regulars at the House of BBQ, one of the few sit down restaurants we went to when I was growing up and I don’t know if we only ordered the chicken because we knew it was so good or because it was the cheapest item on the menu but I can’t say that I ever tried the ribs or anything else on the menu.  Even as an adult when I am responsible for my own ordering, I still stick with the chicken.  It comes with a simple salad bar, a miniature loaf of homemade bread, French fries and always a spiced apple ring sitting on top of the chicken.  You can order a baked potato instead of the fries, of course, but the fries are on the top of my list of worthy splurges.

The restaurant has a large open seating area with chicken and rooster décor as well as some stuffed animal heads on the wall.  Going there is like sitting in your favorite spot on an old reliable couch.  From the smell before you even open the door, to the bucket on the table for discarding your bones, to that bright red apple ring;  none of this has changed in all my life and I hope it never does.

California Dreaming

As a part of my Baking and Pastry program at the Culinary Institute of America we were required to do an internship.  What would possess a native Upstate New Yorker to decide to do this in Napa, California?  That is actually a whole other story.  My time in California was strained by a continual homesickness but I could not let the opportunities to see and experience such a renowned region be wasted.  With upcoming classes in wines and spirits awaiting me when I returned to school, I headed out diligently to many of the fine wineries in the Napa Valley on my days away from work.  But the best thing about Napa was the long growing season allowing for delicious fresh produce everywhere you turned.

           

If I ever to decided to be a vegetarian, the Napa Valley is where I would want to reside.  I have always loved fresh fruit and vegetables in season but where I grew up those seasons are sometimes painfully short.  I believe in picking my own strawberries to assure that they are the best and would never buy sweet corn off from a stand if I couldn’t see it growing in field out back.  In California, I never met a vegetable I didn’t like.  There was a Farmer’s Market set up somewhere in the valley every day of the week and you would often see the area’s top chefs searching for ingredients for that day’s specials.  

             

I had the opportunity to try fruits and vegetables that I had never heard of and some I would have sworn I could never like.  And with the exception of the tomatoes I liked every one.  You need not think there is something wrong with the tomatoes in the Napa Valley, I just don’t like tomatoes (see the blog entry Learning to Like).  One of my favorite treats from California was the white peach.  White peaches have since found their way to the east coast but back then I had never heard of them, let alone eaten one. 

On my last day in California, I definitely had to have some white peaches for the road.

The peaches I purchased that day were the size of softballs, so sweet and the delicate juice ran down my arm as I bit through the giving fuzzy skin.  The flavor slightly more subtle than its cousin the yellow peach, the flesh perfectly soft but not mushy and the gush of juices with each bite is enough to give me a culinary flashback.  I have not had a white peach since that was that good and I hope that it wasn’t my last.  It might even be a good enough reason to plan a trip to Napa in July.  I kept the pit from a few of those peaches for the longest time and in my fantasies I would plant that pit and grow my own little piece of the California dream, my own loving, giving white peach tree.

Prodigal Pie

I assume that anyone who has a sibling has probably had some form of argument, tongue in cheek as it may be, over which child is Mom’s favorite.  I have two older brothers, making me the baby of the family and the only girl.  I am sure I was the most spoiled child with both my parents and also two brothers to protect me from the world.  But I have proof that I was not Mom’s favorite.  That proof is in the pudding and that pudding is in the pie, chocolate cream pie to be exact.

The proof is in the pudding is an old phrase that means something has to be experienced in order to prove how good it is and is an altered version of the original English phrase, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”  In this case, I mean it both figuratively and literally.

My oldest brother, eleven years my senior, went to college and got married when I was still a teen.  My other brother was eight years older than me but lived at home for a little while after he graduated high school, so we were always a little closer in time and experience.  It wasn’t until he moved away that I realized who was the favorite and developed my own interpretation of the tale of the prodigal son.  In reality, this has very little to do with the biblical definition of the prodigal son and has only to do with the killing of the fatted calf but religious studies were not a strong suit for me and I somehow made connections of my own.

My mother makes a terrific chocolate cream pie with a scratch piecrust and chocolate filling cooked on top of the stove.  It is rich and creamy and far removed from the instant pudding made from a box.  The pie was my favorite but we only seemed to get it when my brother came home for a visit, a special treat for a special son.  I looked forward to his visits for more than just family bonding.  I don’t even know if he realized that this was the only time we had chocolate cream pie.

 After I pointed out the co-incidence of the pie timing to my mother, I stopped calling it chocolate cream pie and each time my mom woudld let me know my brother was coming for a weekend I would ask if she would be making “prodigal pie.”

Oh, Fudge!

In seventh and eight grades we had elective classes which included things like metal shop, sewing, wood shop and cooking.  Usually the guys went for the shop classes and the girls all took home economics.  Going against stereotype, especially being a chubby girl, I chose metalwork over the opportunity to cook and eat.  I did this because I already knew how to boil water.  I actually knew how to cook a lot of things by that age but I did learn one particular item in a high school class.  I learned to make fudge in Chemistry class.

It turns out there is a lot of chemistry involved in the making of fudge, mostly having to do with the process of crystallization, but at that time I was just glad to have a lesson that seemed to have some usefulness.  Since I learned to make fudge in my junior year of high school, I was a typical teenager and generally poor.  Not only did that fudge project probably earn me one of very few A’s in chemistry, it also gave me a go-to gift idea for birthdays and Christmas.  Batch after batch of creamy chocolate fudge became my choice for family and friends.  And I later added peanut butter fudge to my repertoire to expand my giving possibilities. 

I never got any complaints about my repetitive fudge gifting and found that my cousins looked forward to their pound of fudge each occasion.  But I must take this time to confess that I was not always so successful with homemade gifts and offer a cautionary tale involving another confection that I used for gift giving.  This was my homemade caramel corn, which went over well until one Christmas when both my grandmother and aunt happened to get un-popped kernels of corn, sending them each to the dentist.  So, unless you have a deal for kickbacks from your local dentist, stick with the fudge.  It may cause cavities in the long run but if you make it right it should never break a tooth.

Fun Food Fact-ory

 As can be evidenced through the trend of open kitchens in restaurants, watching your food or drink being made is interesting and sometimes fun.  This would also account for the popularity of tours set up in food factories.  I suspect that I have participated in more of these tours than the average person and can include in my list at least one factory outside of the United States.  I have been to pretzel and potato chip factories in Pennsylvania, a few cider mills, many wineries, a couple breweries, a factory where they made Jelly Bellys, the Hershey Experience and my favorite, by far, the Cadbury factory in England. 

I made a discovery at the Cadbury factory.  As a child, I clearly remember being introduced to a new confection at Easter (probably in the early 80’s) called the Cadbury Crème Egg.  A chocolate egg filled with cream that mimicked a real egg, it was one of those oddities that grabbed your attention at the corner store.  As an adult I find it a little repulsive to eat something that looks like an egg when you crack it open but as a child I was intrigued.  When I visited the Cadbury factory, I learned that this creation had actually been around since 1971 and my inner child felt cheated out of years of sickly sweet pleasure.

Further, not only did the Cadbury company keep this treasure from me as a child but they were also secreting away at that very time (mid-90’s) another candy bar that I found to be a fast favorite.  That treasure was called the Boost bar and consisted of cookie bits (aka biscuit bits), caramel and chocolate covering.  Although the flavor profile would be very close to a Twix bar, something about the cookie bits, which were little round balls of crispy cookie, set them apart from similar bars I could access in America.  It has been so long since my last Boost bar, I will admit that my memory has probably been enhanced by something cliché like “absence makes the heart grow fonder” but I would love the chance to test that theory.

Not a product of long-term memory enhancement is another phenomenon regarding Cadbury chocolate.  I am sure that most people have had a Cadbury product since they are now widely available but you might be surprised to find that they are even better when experienced in their native country.  There is something lost in translation.  Not a language translation, since they too speak English, but in recipe translation.  Cadbury products sold here are made here through contracted companies and unfortunately all ingredients are not same.  I think it is in the dairy that we are let down, American cows just don’t measure up.  Just as Irish butter is thought to be superior and cream liquors from the British Isles delicious, so the case for milk chocolate.  Perhaps an English accent is not just a term we should be using for speech but also for the smooth creamy tone of a chocolate bar.