Now for the cum omnibuspart.
So what do you like on your pizza? It took me a couple of reads to figure out what was going on at the chirp house with that zucchini pizza. At first I assumed that the zucchini was being used as a pizza topping. Then I looked again and saw that the zucchini was part of the crust of the pizza. It sounds like it was some kind of weird quiche thing. I guess I am a food Tory or something, because to me that is not pizza. Pizza involved bread with stuff on it, not stuff on top of non-bread stuff. Mollie Katzen should call that thing what it is, and it is not a pizza.
And the stuff on top of a pizza should not involve zucchini, either! No trying to sneak broccoli on the pizza either, that is just fake.
I like smaller amounts of things with a strong flavor, so even if I weren’t opposed to zucchini on ideological grounds, I think it would just be too bland and watery. I actually do not care for pepperoni, it makes me unbearably thirsty. I like things like ham (especially prosciutto), well-drained sausage, mushrooms, olives, things like that. The pizza I made last week had chicken, olives, mushrooms, and bacon. One of these days I’m going to make what I am told is a pizza quattro stagioni (ham, mushrooms, artichokes, and anchovies.)
I am open to trying exotic and unusual ingredients. My dh and I honeymooned in California (Carmel and Monterey), where we tried pizza topped with smoked salmon and gorgonzola. We really liked it, and we make it at home sometimes.
There is a restaurant nearby that lavishes such vast quantities of toppings on its pizza that it’s hard to see the (mounds of) cheese through the swarms of toppings. Then you lift your slice and the toppings rain down on the plate. I am not crazy about that “dump every possible ingredient in huge quanitities” approach. So I guess that means I am not of the tribe of Chicago-style pizza.
It is amazing how deeply satisfying pizza is. Did God give us a pizza-loving gene? As soon as Hambet figures out I am making pizza, he literally jumps for joy. He stands at the oven door and watches it bake. When I pull it out of the oven, he leaps into his booster seat. Once I slid the pizza onto the cutting board, turned around for a moment, and turned back around to find Hambet standing on the table, crouching low by the pizza, rolling the pizza wheel all over it.