Mangia! or, October is pizza month

Davide and the table.

For one wonderful evening, our farm table was transformed into an Italian country kitchen. Two young houseguests–friends of NCPR apprentice producer Tasha Haverty–stayed with us during their visit to the north country. Julia Metzger-Traber is a childhood friend of Tasha’s, now living and working as a performance artist in Berlin; Davide de Lillis is from a small village outside of Rome and is also working as an actor and performance artist in Europe.

Wahoo! Davide offered to cook dinner in exchange for a place to stay. He transformed garden bounty into an imaginative spread of REAL Italian plates–roasted vegetables, sauteed greens, antipasto, tomatoes for bruschetta.

Vesuvius erupting–source of the first pizza? Probably not.

We laughed a bit about what American’s call “Italian” food, pizza being the main object of our humor. Which prompted me to do a little Googling about pizza: here’s the Wiki link, where I learned that Virgil refers to flat bread as a holder for other foods, though very likely not foods like pineapple on “novelty” American pizzas. At another site maintained by Virgilio’s, a New York pizzeria, there’s an apocryphal story about pizza first being eaten after Vesuvius erupted…well, it’s a stretch but fun. Plus, they’ve aggregated lots of pizza facts and factoids, e.g., there are over 9,000 pizzerias in NYS alone, Americans eat over 3 billiion pizzas each year, and October is National Pizza Month, so designated in 1987. Here’s a short Comedy Central vimeo piece in honor of the month.

THE BIG QUESTION:

Anchovies? or, NO anchovies? Favorite foods to use on pizza dough?

(I’m totally thumbs up on anchovies.)

Tags: italian food, national pizza month, pizza