So, here is what happened post pizza-ingredient pilgrimage....
I spent some time beforehand soaking and draining the 4 heads of spinach to remove any dirt, and separated the leaves. Then I quickly prepared the tzatziki, a very basic recipe found on allrecipes.com, consisting of yogurt, minced garlic, cucumbers, lemon juice and olive oil.
We chopped the rest of our garlic (about 4 or 5 cloves), onion, tomatoes and olives. In the meantime, the dough was rising (this took about 2 hours) and the oven was preheating at 450. When it was about ready, the spinach was sauteed with some olive oil, red onion and a tinge of parmesan cheese.
Then the spinach and the rest of our ingredients were ready to go atop the dough (which I placed on a greased pan, putting some flower on the bottom to prevent sticking); this included our feta cheese, which we cut and crumbled, sliced kalamata olives, sliced sun-dried tomatoes, parmesan cheese, a little fresh mozzarella, and chopped tomato. Pizza making is fairly simple (okay, I realize that I got bakery dough and didn't make it...), you just need the right, fresh ingredients.
Pre-oven, then baked until the crust is golden...
Post-oven. I look a little crazy. It was a long day.
Post ingestion of the Greek-inspired pie and tzaktki sauce, post enjoyment of some sweet cabarnet, some jasmine incense and Ella Fitzgerald, Colin began to read out the history of the aubergine and onion, of yeast and baking and how the first pizza may have very well developed in Egypt. (Really, who would have thought that this would be our Saturday night?) The culinary escapade was derived from Italian Pizza and Hearth Breads by Elizabeth Romer, equipped with lovely watercolor illustrations. I randomly picked this up from Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, a little shop on West 10th Street in the village that is very easy to miss if you're not paying attention. She specializes in out-of-print and antiquarian cookbooks.
I get somewhat overwhelmed when I start exploring the history of food, delving into cultures that were, and still are, so largely self-sufficient. For the most part, there is a huge disconnect between myself and food, a certain lack of creativity that stretches beyond cutting back on take-out or concocting original recipes. While I admittedly love the concept of not just running across to Key Foods and, rather, exploring my neighborhood, it's people and variety, with my current life this is what I am resigned to doing most of the time; it's just far less time consuming. I’m not at home aging my own cheese, preparing my own breads, pressing my olive oil. I do not consistently view grains as a "gift of the gods," as the Egyptians did. (Though beer, perhaps...) I take it for granted; I don't even think about it most of the time.
While one can dream about ancient cultures or retreating to a commune somewhere in the Green Mountains, I suppose there are options available for us city-folk to somewhat restore the balance of our constantly conflicting desires. There are food co-ops. There's urban gardening. There's simply taking a walk through your neighborhood to see what else is out there, to see how other people are doing things, and coming to your own theoretical conclusions on the foundations of pizza [or insert food of choice] and, hence, of life. Yes, it all goes back to the walk.
Rebecca Solnit has a great moment of insight in her non-fiction work, Wanderlust, on which I will leave you. It's not related to cooking, but it sums up the sentiment pretty much exactly.
I had told [my friend] about an ad I found in the Los Angeles Times a few months ago that I had been thinking about ever since. It was for a CD-ROM encyclopedia, and the text that occupied a whole page read, “You used to walk across town in the pouring rain to use our encyclopedias. We’re pretty confident that we can get your kid to click and drag.” I think it was the kid’s walk in the rain that constituted the real education, at least of the senses and the imagination. Perhaps the child with the CD-ROM encyclopedia will stray from the task at hand, but wandering in a book or a computer takes place within more constricted and less sensual parameters. It’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value. Both rural and urban walking have for two centuries been prime ways of exploring the unpredictable and the incalculable.
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