Neanderpundit

Any of you who read Steve know of his addiction to foodstuffs, and hos NowLive shows about cooking have been great. So I thought I’d give one of his recipes a try.

Now, I loves me some pizza. As do the Ogwife and Oglet. Now, their taste in pies is not the same as mine- I tend to like traditional pies and they like The Hut. Which is, to paraphrase Doug Adams, Almost, but not totally, utterly unlike pizza.

I still need to get a nice peel. I used cookie sheets tonight. which worked basically OK. I also need to get some semolina to get the pies in and out of the oven easier- but I gotta tell you, if you watch Steve’s NowLive show, and you follow his recipe even moderately well, you will cook a damned good pie, right out of the gate. I did- in fact, I cooked two.

I was unable to find any Saporito sauce- but I found the Bonta. And for the price of a small Hut pizza I bought enough sauce to make two hundred thousand pizzas. Well, maybe not that many, but a lot.

I’m going to experiment with pre-mixing the sauce and packaging it in ziplocs that I can freeze and pull out when ready. The crust is simplicity itself. And I’m happy to say, steve did NOT lead me wrong, his directions get you a good basic street pizza you can master in about ten minutes.

I’m fortunate enough to have a large chunk of the Christmas season off, for one reason or another. At one time, though, this meant almost nothing to anyone I worked with.

See, in a lot of undustries, there is no slack time. Where I worked, in the steel industry, coke batteries and blast furnaces didn’t wait for Jesus to be born, and then go back to work- a coke battery and a blast furnace need to be tended when it is their time and nothing will stop that. So a lot of folks in the steel mills tend to work those holidays, maybe spending a few moments here and there with family before going to work and toiling all night or day.

Likewise- healthcare workers, police, ambulance crews, fire departments, soldiers- a whole awful lot of folks are busy this Christmas. When I did jobs that required my persistent presence during the holidays, I used to look at the homes with unplowed driveways and think about how nice it must be not to have to get out of bed early on Christmas day. Now that I have that luxury, I’m mindful of those who are up and about when I’m in my warm bed, and I say a prayer for them. Maybe you would like to, as well.