Das Zaa

Le abstract and poorly drawn pizza.

When I was a little kid, I hated pizza.  I'm not sure what my reasons were for that. I have two basic theories. One is that my mother ordered pizza that was either spiced to hell or she spiced it when she got it to the house.

The other theory is that  it was just too complicated for me to handle . . . too many flavors all competing together. Whatever the case, as a small kid, I was content to eat spaghetti when everyone else was eating their pizza. Well, spaghetti and the garlic bread. I always loved the hot gooey goodness of great garlic bread.  My mom's was amazing, actually.  She made it taste like heaven.

Over time, I got past the aversion to pizza and embraced the concept.  I'm guessing this had to do with the fact that my mom started working at Pizza Hut and I was around it all the time. Actually, my family has quite a legacy with working in pizza places. My mother did for years, as did one step-father, my brother, and my sister-in-law.  In fact, the last time my SIL worked in a pizza place, she was my brother's boss.

I have to admit probably my favorite pizza memories are tied in with my grandmother and frozen pizzas.  It's not that the pizza from the store was good. In fact, it really kind of sucked. The crust tasted like cardboard and all of the meat on it was questionable. The peppers were cut in little square cubes that added so much water to the pizza as they melted that they made it soggy and weird.

Gran had her own little GRAN tricks about it too. Round pizza always ended up on a rectangular baking sheet, so there were lines of burnt down the back.  This is assuming the whole thing wasn't burned. It often was.  If it wasn't burned, it was either slightly underdone or very very VERY crisp. The kind of crisp that cut your tongue and made you worry for your teeth.

Despite all of that, frozen pizza with Gran is still a great memory because it made her so happy. Gran, as I have mentioned before, hated cooking.  Any meal that was easy and basically effortless delighted her.  I think she felt like she was cheating the system somehow.  So every time we had frozen pizza, she was in a great mood.  After all, the most work put into it was hacking through the stiff crust after we pulled it out of the oven.  It really doesn't surprise me that I like my food on the burnt side.

In college, whenever my best friend and I would host parties, our party food consisted of frozen pizzas we would chop into small, bit sized pieces. Yes, that was our finger food. I think we even thought the bit-sized portion made it all fancy.  No one ever complained though. Then again, poor drunken college students will eat anything. I'm shocked we didn't serve bite-sized ramen noodles.

Speaking of college, lux food for us in those days was Domino's.  We'd always get the pepperoni in shroom. After we got some non-meat eating friends, we started getting cheese with jalapenos (even our non-meat eating friends could never commit to leaving off cheese). We'd take the jalapenos off and enjoy the hot cheese with the happy essence of jalapeno juices still in it. This is still a type of pizza I enjoy quite a lot.

Over all though, my favorite pizza is and always will be pepperoni with mushrooms. I don't get it that often these days. The local places don't do it well and if it's not up to standards, it's really not worth eating. Most of the time, I opt for the safer bet of thin crust sausage. Oh, and not sausage with fennel in it. I hate fennel. I miss the pepperoni and shroom, but as I said, if I can't get it good, there really isn't a point.

Hmm. Maybe that's what happened when I was little. Maybe my first tastes of pizza had something objectionable like fennel or bad crust or crappy cheese.  The fennel thing really wouldn't surprise me. I think my mom liked it a lot. She was always kind of twisted like that.