Pizza

It seems like every stage of life comes with a favorite pizza. I have a long relationship with it.

When I was growing up, my Mom and I used to make homemade pizza together and we’d often have friends over. It was a whole day process because we made homemade sauce and did the dough from scratch and cut up all sorts of yummy fresh ingredients. One of our little friends would say “Let’s go to Heather Hut” so I guess it was good.

We did have Pizza Hut in Ecuador, and they made the most amazing romana cheese salad dressing. That’s random, I know.

In college, our (Troy and I) favorite was Rocky Rococo’s. Just looking at the logo made me instantly hungry for pizza. In Chicago, Giordano’s stuffed pizza, of course. When we moved to Colorado Springs, we discovered a small family business called Home Bake Pizza, which was before the whole Papa Murphy’s craze (love their creamy garlic chicken pizza) . They put more ingredients on their pizza than I have ever seen, and they had funky things like red onion and garlic and herb mix. Yum.

Meg and I are also big fans of barbecue pizza, which I started making when trying to use up leftover turkey. I do make homemade quite often, but the short version with bread maker dough and sauce from a jar.

And I think my current favorite (only when in America, sniff) is the Greek pizza at California Pizza Kitchen. Yum. eee. Hungry yet?

Heather makes the best home-made pizza ever. I cannot describe it here, however, because…

1. ...it is impossible to describe, like the beauty of the sky at dusk reflected on an Etruscan urn or vine or something else Etruscan, because the word “Etruscan” just sounds so magnificent, doesn’t it?

and

2. ...describing Heather’s pizza would degrade it, in the same way that describing my first kiss in scientific terms (lots of saliva) would degrade the magic of that moment.

I like Heather’s pizza because she lets me sprinkle bacon bits liberally throughout. It can not be said enough, nor strongly enough, that “bacon makes everything extra special.”

There is a pizza company here in Spain called Telepizza. Telepizza is to Spain what Domino’s is to the States. At first, we did not like Telepizza, but now we do like it because they have improved. (Translation: their crust evolved from the shoe leather phase).

I prefer two kinds of pizza: pepperoni and double pepperoni. I think someone should come up with a triple pepperoni pizza. And don’t kid yourself thinking Pizza Hut’s Pepperoni Lovers pizza is the equivalent of a triple pepperoni pizza. It is most emphatically not. In my opinion it barely qualifies as a cheese pizza. I. Love. Pepperoni.

Heather, on the other hand, likes to mix it up a little (translation: goat cheese and elderberries). So now Heather gets Telepizza’s BBQ chicken pizza. This, in my opinion, is a waste of dough, in both senses of the word.