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!