That's Amore

"the perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4 am."--charles pierce

When I was younger, I had a week-to-week social routine. On Friday nights, I went to high school football games and walked around the stadium with my friends, eating the kind of double-flavored 25 cent lollipops that tasted like chalk. I gossiped, and wondered what it was like to be in high school, and drank Coca-Cola out of glass bottles. From year to year, conversation topics changed and I may have even grown up a little, but one thing remained a constant: before every game, my family ordered pizza, and we sat at TV trays and watched Jeopardy in our living room.

I think my family may have justified our Friday night pizza habit with the idea that pizza is the everyone-pleasing, all-inclusive package of food. It satisfies both picky eaters and---as my sister, Meredith calls her friends that have never met a food they didn't like---"garbage disposals."

When I started high school, we changed our eating habits tremendously. On Friday nights, my mother would grill or she would sautee, or on really idle evenings of self, she would "heat up". Needless to say, we stopped having weekly encounters with Papa John, unless someone invited him to a birthday party. Every now and then, I missed him.

Around July of this year, I suggested to my mother that we start incorporating pizza back into our diets. In a Molly Ringwald film, where parents are too snarky for their own good, our conversation may have gone this way:

Me: I think we should start incorporating pizza back into our diets.

My Mother: Oh, that's rich. (cue laugh track)

But instead, she recognized "our diets" as being the operative phrase and was supportive.

To start, I thought about the ingredients that make pizza delicious, and as a result, those ingredients were what I revised. I replaced pizza crust with multi-grain pita bread, bought part-skim low-fat mozzarella cheese, turkey pepperoni, and all the vegetables I could get my hands on. The result: the TV-tray pizza I'd missed for years and years.

TV Tray Pizza
-1 multi-grain flatbread pita
-Hormel turkey pepperoni
-part-skim, low fat mozzarella cheese
-Ragu pizza sauce
-2 teaspoons Smart Balance olive oil
-1 pinch crushed red pepper
-1 pinch pepper
-cubed vegetables of your choice

I tend to season the pita bread with Smart Balance olive oil, crushed red pepper, and pepper for two reasons: 1) it tastes good. 2) seasoning things makes me feel like a professional chef.

As for the toppings: get experimental. I've tried everything from spinach to roma tomatoes to artichoke hearts. I don't need to tell you how to create a pizza you love, but I will anyway: pizza toppings are like paint samples. If you stare at them long enough, eventually you'll discover what your preference has been all along. My preference: mushrooms, turkey pepperoni, green, yellow and red peppers, and red onion. Top the seasoned crust with pizza sauce and cheese, then decorate.

Preheat the oven to 350 and bake until the cheese is melted and the pita bread has hardened a bit. This will take about ten minutes. Then, enjoy!

Dessert Don't Hurt

I have a mantra about dessert: "Always." I believe dessert is the reward you earn for being a commendable person, or for not spending too much money that day, or for washing behind your ears. It is the after-dinner award that pairs well with coffee. It is sugar and spice and everything...fattening.

When I was younger, I discovered my mother was not a "just-because" baker, she was a "special occasion" baker. When she threw on her apron, it was because Christmas Eve was tomorrow or someone we loved had died. She baked in the face of excitement and sympathy. She baked with purpose or she didn't bake at all.

If kitchen-stress is genetic, it, without a doubt, forgets to skip a generation--I caught it like a cold. I didn't find the clank of pots and pans euphonious; there was something so taxing about it. Perhaps it was that in my microwave-enthusiast perception of it all, baking meant a mess to clean up. It also probably meant something was over or undercooked, a doughy catastrophe, a failed attempt.

In college, I met girls my age who baked because they liked to be in the kitchen---because there was something tranquil about slow, slow Rod Stewart on the radio and brownie batter. I gravitated toward these people; I had to unearth what it was that separated them from me: their serenity from my stress.

And then, I put my finger on it. They were not baking. They were creating.

So, I began to create desserts, allowing simple, health(ier) ingredients to exist beside each other. I gave fat free Cool Whip its due and stopped feeling like a criminal for using chocolate.

This summer, my mother and I experimented with using frozen Cool Whip as a substitute for ice cream. First, we let it exist alone as an ice cream. We crushed up 100 Calorie packets of Oreos and sprinkled them in, letting the mixture freeze overnight. Perfect substitute for Cookies and Cream ice cream, right? Absolutely not. The next day, we found our "ice cream" was caulk-like enough to use for home repair.

The secret is: let the Cool Whip serve as an inclusion, not a dish. Give it enough attention, but not enough attention to where it's a one-man show. It should complement, not conduct. If you want an ice cream that conducts, try Ben. (See Also: Jerry)

Ice-Cream-Sandwich-Substitute:

You'll need:

Low Fat Honey Graham Crackers (or any Low Fat version of this cookie)

Strawberries (thinly sliced)

Fat Free Cool Whip

Then, spread the Cool Whip on the graham crackers however gingerly or heartily you'd like. But remember, Cool Whip is an inclusion. Don't get crazy. Slice your strawberries as thin as paper. Very important. Thin, like paper, and layer them on top of the Cool Whip.

Like this:

Then, freeze them overnight and enjoy!

Before I turned ten, I knew how to fry chicken. Frying chicken together, I thought, was the way mothers and daughters across the country bonded: over a "fry daddy", flour spotting our aprons like sawdust. I remember the sound of hot grease popping from the kitchen and Vince Gill on the radio. I remember caramel cowtails from the gas station and Pizza Hut on TV trays.

And then, I couldn't remember, because it stopped happening. Not because we wanted it to, but because sometime around the new millennium, we, as a family, stopped neglecting our metabolisms.

Then, at 3702 N. Walnut Street, we began having orange slices for snack instead of Zebra Cakes, and friends stopped coming over with the intent of raiding our pantry for snack food. My eleven-year-old friends wanted Skittles, not almonds. They wanted a fun afternoon with fun games and fun people and fun food.

Since then, we've done our best to call back to memory all the food we miss eating: all the syrupy things, all the fried things, and all the chocolately things, and we revise them so we can eat them. The trial-and-error of it is a puzzle, a mathematical equation: dividing the calories without sacrificing taste. Sometimes the result is a flop: we laugh at ourselves, throw it in the trashcan and promise to never speak of it again. However, when we create something worth eating again, we talk about it for weeks, to people we know and people we hardly know. We are successful and we are creative. We are the Julia Childs we always thought we'd be.

I'm dedicating this blog to my mother: the Zumba-enthusiast, Dr. Oz-worshipping, health food nut that she is, for teaching me there ain't no shame in sugar-free ice cream. Because, if it looks like ice cream and (for the most part) tastes like ice cream, then it must be ice cream.