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Feb. 5th, 2006 11:12 amSo I got up this morning and realized that a) I am, technically speaking, hosting a Superbowl party today, albeit a Superbowl party with only two guests, and b) I agreed to make pizza rolls.
Now, the pizza rolls are a recipe handed down through the female line of my family since Great-Grandma D'Orazio (who was herself born a Fortunato, and so we regard all the Alfadenesi Fortunatos as cousins, even though no exact relationship can be traced) and it begins with the part where you make pizza dough from scratch. The pizza dough recipe, from what I recall of the notations in my mother's handwritten recipe book, originated with Little Caesar's (which as you may know is owned by Greeks); such are the vagaries of my Italian-American heritage.
The last time I made pizza rolls was a miserable experience: my mother insisted that I had to make them for a family reunion at which my grandmother would be present (through some sort of generational rule of cooking expertise, any recipe handed down gets slightly worse each time, at least in the estimation of the cook: my pizza rolls are nowhere near as good as my mother's, which in turn cannot beat my grandmother's. I don't remember ever eating my great-grandmother's pizza rolls, but throughout my childhood the pizza roll gold standard was produced by my grandmother's sister, and since Auntie Clara passed on, there have been none to compare). So after making pizza rolls, with the kneading and the chopping and the grating and the baking, on an eighty-degree day in June in my tiny apartment, and having them come out barely-acceptably, and trucking them out to the family reunion, it of course turned out that my grandmother had also made pizza rolls and no one ate my pizza rolls and I seriously considered never making pizza rolls again.
But now I am 600 miles away from the chance of having my efforts compared to my grandmother's, and it's nice and cool, and I have had a few epiphanies like, "Yes, you can knead the dough in the bowl," and "If they've been coming out too bland, add more seasonings," and so I am trying it again.
So obviously this is when the kitchen sink springs a leak.
( Meme Lynn tagged me to do behind the cut, containing absolutely no mortifying confessions whatsoever. )
Now, the pizza rolls are a recipe handed down through the female line of my family since Great-Grandma D'Orazio (who was herself born a Fortunato, and so we regard all the Alfadenesi Fortunatos as cousins, even though no exact relationship can be traced) and it begins with the part where you make pizza dough from scratch. The pizza dough recipe, from what I recall of the notations in my mother's handwritten recipe book, originated with Little Caesar's (which as you may know is owned by Greeks); such are the vagaries of my Italian-American heritage.
The last time I made pizza rolls was a miserable experience: my mother insisted that I had to make them for a family reunion at which my grandmother would be present (through some sort of generational rule of cooking expertise, any recipe handed down gets slightly worse each time, at least in the estimation of the cook: my pizza rolls are nowhere near as good as my mother's, which in turn cannot beat my grandmother's. I don't remember ever eating my great-grandmother's pizza rolls, but throughout my childhood the pizza roll gold standard was produced by my grandmother's sister, and since Auntie Clara passed on, there have been none to compare). So after making pizza rolls, with the kneading and the chopping and the grating and the baking, on an eighty-degree day in June in my tiny apartment, and having them come out barely-acceptably, and trucking them out to the family reunion, it of course turned out that my grandmother had also made pizza rolls and no one ate my pizza rolls and I seriously considered never making pizza rolls again.
But now I am 600 miles away from the chance of having my efforts compared to my grandmother's, and it's nice and cool, and I have had a few epiphanies like, "Yes, you can knead the dough in the bowl," and "If they've been coming out too bland, add more seasonings," and so I am trying it again.
So obviously this is when the kitchen sink springs a leak.
( Meme Lynn tagged me to do behind the cut, containing absolutely no mortifying confessions whatsoever. )