Saturday morning. You know the drill. Eggs. Yoga. Whole Foods. Safeway. Home.
Then lunch and work on the house.
Except tonight we’ve got Becky coming over. It’s her birthday next week, Tuesday I think, and we’re having her to dinner. We’re making pizza. So we straighten and clean and make things presentable, instead of building like anything new. Then when Becky arrives we set down to some cooking.
It’s funny what people like on their pizza. I do mushrooms and black olives, Dawn black and green olives, and Becky green peppers. I don’t object to green peppers, actually, but we don’t usually do them on pizza. Dawn hates them, and hates them on pizza, I guess is why. I don’t like the green olives on my pizza. I figure black olives are canned, and therefore cooked, whereas green olives are bottled, as in preserved, in vinegar. Maybe they’re cooked beforehand, I don’t know. I think cucumbers are somehow cooked on their way to becoming pickles. But anyway, I love green olives, but only cold, either alone or in a martini. Don’t like ’em cooked.
Dawn also makes this cobbler thingy for dessert. Blueberry. No blueberries to be found in the produce department at Safeway, so we go with frozen. Or maybe there were some organic ones at some outrageous price. But frozen are fine for cooking. The cobble part of the cobbler comes from oats, which we find that we do not have when we go to look for them. Dawn saves me the trip back to Safeway when she decides that an instant oatmeal package will suffice.
We take a walk to and around Lincoln Park between pizza and dessert. I’m feeling quite fat and lazy, and have no desire to walk, but I’m glad that we do and feel all the better for it. And I’m also just generally pleased that we live so close to such a good size park. (Some quick calculations, measuring with Google Earth: A length of .16 miles and a width = .07 miles give us an area of .0112 square miles. At 640 acres per square mile, that’s a little over seven acres.)
We drive Becky home and then come back to all them dishes.
There are advantages to being married to someone whose great grandparents came over from Italy. My wife makes a fabulous pizza from scratch every weekend, and we usually have enough homemade marinara sauce to have with pasta later.
As far as toppings are concerned, Ed, you and I are opposites. Keep all of the mushrooms and olives in this world to yourself. I like green, yellow, orange or red bell peppers on mine, along with onions. That’s what we eat at home, anyway. The wife puts olives on her half, as well. If I’m ordering pizza out, I usually get sausage. Aside from the pizza I get at home, I’m nuts about Scicilian thick pizza with sausage. Yes, please, send it this way.
I don’t like the taste of olives, but my problem with shrooms is the texture. The few times I’ve had to suffer through them, it felt like I was eating rubber erasers or something. One time we were invited over to my former boss’es house (the VP with whom I got along) and his wife was making lunch for us. I was horrified that she was preparing some gigantic mushrooms in a skillet for us to eat on hamburger buns. Call me a stick in the mud, but I think it’s insane to invite people over to your house for lunch and serve them gigantic skanky mushrooms on bread as their main course. I kept looking over my shoulder for the cavalry (another course) which never arrived. And then she was watching me intently as I tried to swallow each bite. Torture.
I will say that my attitude is a little different when I’m overseas. I’m more adventurous over there. When we went to Spain we drove through acres and acres of olive trees, and I ate some olives there. It seemed the thing to do. They were salty and awful, but at least I gave it the old (a few credits of) college try. I also drank espresso straight while I was there. I’m quite the man in Spain…