30 days in November 12...

You know the old joke about the Dalai Lama in a pizza shop asking if the pizza guy can make him one with everything? Well today is:

Pizza with the works except anchovies day

I wonder why no anchovies? Personally I sometimes enjoy a pizza, but at other times I don’t. I always think that it's just cheese and tomato on toast and if you order it in it's very expensive cheese on toast.

We’ve made our own pizza from dough through to sauce a few times and cooked it in our wood fired chimenea. It’s a lot of effort what with kneading the dough, making the sauce, grating the cheese, and carefully arranging all those toppings on the top, but it tastes really good.

Pizza has been around a long time. The first mention of it is in a 10^th century Latin manuscript from Gaeta in Central Italy. Maybe the monks had anchovies on theirs but the modern pizza first showed an appearance in Naples in the late 18^th or early 19^th century. The first pizzeria opened in the States in 1905 and really took off; so much so that today thirteen percent of the US population eats a few slices on any given day.

I have had my best pizzas in the states. We often had them for lunch straight out of a huge clay oven in the King of Prussia Mall. There's no doubt that the American do a great pizza, but it's not the sort of thing I'd order at an Italian restaurant for dinner.

My favourite is pepperoni, although I am partial to few sliced jalapenos on the top. It’s a very versatile food and you can put just about anything on as a topping. Personally I don’t like seafood pizzas, perhaps that’s why they held the anchovies.