Monthly Archives: June 2010

commie pizza (part 2)

food, the day lee,

i realized that i had a brain melt the other day and forgot the most important part of the commie pizza story.

we stood in line for a while waiting to order, but when it was our turn, the pizza guy said “we are out of cheese…but i don’t want you to wait, so can you come back in an hour?”

apparently, commies must think that there are different ways of waiting. my friend suggested we “go get martini drys” which i agreed was a marvelous idea, since we had just waited in line for bupkis, and had perfectly stomach empties.

i wondered if i had ever seen an actual martini in Italy before, and whether my friend got that line from James Bond. being a jazz musician, many of his phrases in English come from reading jazz lyrics, like “the girls were working the streets!” or “Oh, to live in Frisco.” turns out he was talking about the Italian brand of vermouth called Martini, which is drunk in Italy as an aperitivo, and is actually what he thought the rest of the world was talking about when they said “martini.” though the name of the cocktail is probably taken from the Martini brand, it’s not quite the same, especially when it comes to packing a punch.

my brain melt might have been from my recent PBJ on a hamburger bun. i was in an office and one of the girls offered me a PBJ. when she looked in her fridge she realized she didn’t have any “normal” bread (and she didn’t want me to wait)…

commie pizza

food, the day lee,

many years ago we were in Florence, Italy, and a friend of ours took us to a Communist Pizza Party. it was outdoors and there were old communists square dancing and young communists eating pizza. on offer were three different pizzas: one with marinara and cheese, one with marinara, cheese and mushrooms, and one with marinara, cheese and salami. i found it hilarious that the price-for-a-slice was not the same. my italian friend looked at me disgustedly and said, “of course not, mushrooms and salami cost more money.” my asinine viewpoint was that the labor to make the pizzas was the same, and since they were Communists, then the price should be the same. to this day my friend does not find this even remotely funny.

so here’s to you – dear square dancers:
pizza with salami, parmesan, cheddar, tomatoes, zucchinis, zucchini blossoms stuffed with St. Andre, and avocado bonanza…

and yes, it’s gluten-free – and simply delicious!

tiddlywinks

food, the day lee, why artists need math

this year there’s a debate that cooking has supplanted knitting as the “new yoga.”

but most of this cooking stuff is really about High Chefery. we have Chefs with Designer Footwear, Chefs Undercover (writing “tales from the trade” novelettes, with titles such as “Under Hot Water,” “Hung High and Dry Like a Cold Cut,” “Kept in the Dark and Fed Shit – My Life as a Mushroom in So and So’s kitchen”), Chefs as Celebrities—full scale photos of them in their pearly white outfits on the walls of their establishments or previously mentioned mugshots on said assorted condiment labels—and Chefs That Are Too Busy to Care, by far the saddest and the most pandemic of the lot.

real cooking, to me, is a matter of keeping relativity in mind—comparing what you start out with (or what’s in your fridge) and what you end up eating. a chef once told me the reason he loves baking is because the end product is larger than the dough. meat, he said, “always tends to shrink.” (“unless you eat it raw,” says the sheepherding-is-the-new-yoga members of this family.)

cooking is also a matter of scale. i’d rather have a really small piece of something fabulous than a million pieces of something half-assed, because the “ever-wanting” feeling is way more satisfying than having had my fill.

here’s a professional of the “ever wanting” group.