Believe it or not, I hated pizza until freshman year of high school. I mean, I really loathed the stuff. I had been subject only to post-soccer game meals of Pizza Hut, or the typical thick, greasy cheese of middle school birthday party pizza. It was so widely loved by everybody that I was determined to keep giving it a shot, but it wasn’t until my mom went to Italy that pizza actually became my idea of a perfect meal. During the summer before my freshman year of high school, my mom was the manager of the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team, and she was flown to Florence, Italy, for a tournament along with the whole team. She returned two weeks later with touristy souvenir key chains and some great pictures she had taken of herself (seeing as my mom doesn’t fully understand the concept of self-pictures, most of them included slanted shots of half her forehead next to a mountain or two). But she also brought back something with her that would become a family tradition – a new recipe for “pizza margherita” that she had procured while visiting a small town in southern Italy.
Watching my mom make pizza margherita for the first time, I had my doubts. After making the dough, she cut hunks of mozzarella and chopped some tomatoes. She minced garlic in what I believed to be an expertly fashion. And then she put the four-ingredient product in the oven -- wait a second. That was it? There were so many empty spaces that I was sure we'd be eating straight dough with a few bites of mozzarella here, and a stray tomato there. My 14-year-old opinion? Way too simple to taste like anything at all. After pulling the pizza from the oven my mom sprinkled some basil and olive oil on and pronounced it “Finito!” I prepared my fake "holy-cow-this-is-GREAT!" face and took a bite. First I could taste the strong clash of the garlic and basil, then the tomatoes spiced with oregano, and finally the melted mozzarella – it tasted nothing like birthday party pizza, and I immediately loved it. Apparently this was a sentiment shared by all, because after that first pizza margherita, my family made it a tradition to have it for dinner every Sunday night.
Even now as a college student with a limited budget, I defy the ordinary and can’t stand pizza loaded with toppings. I prefer the thin-crusted simplicity, the perfect combination of the few ingredients in the pizza margherita my mom made during my high school years. I journeyed home to Madison, Wisconsin, this past weekend to make the pizza I’ve been missing while in Kalamazoo.
When contemplating where to obtain the ingredients for my meal, I was fortunate enough to have many different options of local food co-ops available to me. Madison is a pretty progressive city in terms of food sustainability and locally grown products. After reading Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, I was convinced that in the middle of February a co-op with locally grown food was the route to take. Pollan wasn’t the only one to encourage me to buy locally -- my family is pretty typically Madisonian, in that my parents have always been obsessed with knowing exactly where their food comes from, how local it is, and what went into it. They actually still buy “raw” milk, which means it’s basically straight from the udder into a glass jar, from a friend’s farm about 20 minutes away. They get to regularly visit the cows that give them their milk and that eventually become their meat, and also meet and greet the rampant chickens that give them their eggs. All in all, I’d say they’re pretty food-conscious people – and this definitely made me a bit more food-conscious along the way.
The recipe for the pizza I was attempting to make required some items that were out of season, so on this point I had to be okay with buying more “industrial organic” stuff. Defying the usual horribly depressing, biting cold wind of Wisconsin winters, the Saturday afternoon on which I walked to buy ingredients was a sunny and pleasant day. In my usual ignorant excitement about sudden warm weather -- which turned out to be a mere 44 degrees -- I decided to wear only a tank top and pajama pants. Luckily, the walk was only ten minutes to the Regent Market Co-op and my stupidity was short-lasted. Shivering, I pulled open the door to the co-op and headed down one of the three narrow aisles to the veggies. I picked out five plump roma tomatoes, and then found the door that housed the cheeses. I grabbed a soft hunk of mozzarella, found a small plastic container of “organic” basil leaves…and I was done! We had all the ingredients for the dough at my house, along with olive oil and garlic, so I made my way to the register. I immediately recognized the gangly guy as I put my items on the counter; he had been a couple years behind me in high school. When I handed my money to him I contemplated awkwardly saying something – but before I could he thrust my food items across the counter at me, whipped around to face the shelves behind him, and picked up where he left off on his quest to find the perfect arrangement of Women’s Hormonal Teas and organic coffees.
I planned on making the actual meal around eight that night, as my parents had a costume party to go to – yes, that is correct. I was the designated driver for my parents who were going to a party, while I stayed home and cooked dinner. The costume theme was “wigs and falsies”, so in the end my parents left the house looking like some kind of seductive leopard woman, and a blond wearing a padded football uniform. After I ushered them into the privacy of the car as quickly as possible, I dropped them off and then headed back home to start on my meal.
Thelonius Monk was always a good music choice in terms of cooking – I’ve been a piano player since I was five, and just the sound of it relaxes me – so I cranked up the kitchen CD player and started on the dough. I mixed flour, yeast, oil, salt, and warm water together with my hands and then separated the thick dough into three small segments. Alright. So far, so good. Stretching the dough to make the crust was always the most annoying part; whenever I’d stretch it out into a circular shape, it would immediately recoil back into a small clump when I let go of it. After working for about five minutes on each segment, I had three somewhat normal-looking, thin circles of dough. I slid the knife easily through the hunk of mozzarella, cutting thick disks of the soft white cheese that were about the size of small hockey pucks. I carefully placed about three or four on each pizza, and moved on to dice the roma tomatoes.
I grabbed a clove of garlic from the basket hanging above the sink and chopped it up along with the tomatoes. The juices from the tomatoes combined with the overpowering scent of garlic filled the entire kitchen, and a feeling of complete relaxation flooded over me. I had missed this smell, missed surprisingly the solitude of cooking with only the sound of a piano to accompany my thoughts. I sprinkled the tomatoes and garlic evenly over the three pizzas; I wanted these to look careless, like I hadn’t spent the five minutes that I did trying to place the tomatoes and cheese in perfect, evenly spread spots. I wanted the tomatoes to look carefree, the garlic to look lazily perfect, and the cheese to look like it didn’t give a damn while still appearing immaculately simple.
One by one, I transferred the pizzas into the oven, taking them out when the mozzarella started bubbling on top of the thin browning crust. When all the pizzas were finished, I sprinkled olive oil and salt on top of the cooked mozzarella, garlic and tomato, and finished them off by chopping up a few basil leaves and adding spurts of green all over each pizza. My mom likes adding oregano to her pizzas, but I prefer keeping it extremely simple. I added only crushed red pepper flakes to spice them up a bit. Glancing at the clock, I saw that 8:30 had come and gone – I was supposed to pick up the parents twenty minutes ago. I grabbed the car keys and ran out the back door, using my flour-covered apron as a jacket.
About fifteen minutes later, I returned home about fifteen minutes later with two slightly inebriated, hungry parents who were still singing their rendition of “Dancing In the Dark”. I poured glasses of only the finest two-buck-chuck white wine from a box, they plopped themselves down at the kitchen counter, and we dug in. The crust was thin and crunchy, maybe a bit too burned on some edges...but the mixture of the mozzarella, garlic, tomato and basil was -- for lack of a better word -- amazing. Nothing too complicated, just like my mom made it -- and personally, I liked it with just the spice of the red pepper flakes.
My mom and dad, still in costume, kept exclaiming how amazing it was – I’m not sure if that was genuine, the tipsiness talking, or their attempt to make me feel good about making a meal on my own. I prefer to believe they just really liked it, no matter how many times they had had it. The pizza was gone in a matter of minutes, but we stayed standing in the kitchen for another half hour, laughing at the award they had won for weirdest looking couple at the party. As I cleared the table and started on the dishes, which were only a few, my parents began a game of Scrabble (again, still in costume). I know there aren’t many people who love hanging out with their parents, but I always had. I scrubbed the plates clean of oil, and listened to my parents argue loudly over whether or not “jorp” was a word, smiling as I absentmindedly pushed replay on the CD player. I had missed Thelonius Monk, and my weird parents, and simplicity of pizza and home. An ordinary night. And it was so good to be here.
