by Kevin Burton
National Pizza Day was Feb. 9 and I missed it. That is truly annoying.
Seemingly every day of the year has some kind of national celebration attached to it. Most of them wash over me like the farm report. I don’t have any interest in barrows and gilts so I hear it, but don’t really hear it.
But National Pizza Day is a day I can sink my teeth into. It should be on my calendar, but I missed it.
Tell you what though, not too far into my pizza research and I’ve already found a way around that.
The website of DeNiro’s Pizza in Perry Hall, Maryland near Baltimore says October in National Pizza Month. No way am I waiting till October to celebrate.
I am going to take those 31 pizza days and spread them judiciously throughout the year, much the way you would place pepperoni, evenly distributed, across the entire pie. So essentially pizza day is any day I choose.
That being settled I had big pizza plans for last weekend but did not get to them all. That’s how life goes.
I wrote on Page 7 how Domino’s Pizza was so good back in the day and that for nostalgia’s sake I tried it again. Well they had changed the formula and now Domino’s pizza is only slightly tastier than the box it comes in.
But why couldn’t the reverse be true at some places? Are there places I wasn’t impressed with before that have improved over the years?
I gave that shot to Little Caesar’s Pizza, you know, the pizza-pizza people.
So I got that as Friday lunch. It filled the car with that great pizza smell. I hadn’t had breakfast, but I controlled myself didn’t dig in until we got home.
It was good, not great. Their toppings were big. You know how some places have topping bits so small that if you forgot what you ordered you might not be able to tell what you had?
Little Caesar’s is not like that. But the cheese was nondescript. We had finished it by Sunday night, but it isn’t good enough to make the family rotation.
The DeNiro’s website says 36 percent of Americans think pizza is a good meal for breakfast. My next pizza weekend adventure was on Saturday to try the breakfast pizza at Casey’s. Casey’s is one of our go-to pizzas, but we had not tried their breakfast pizza.
This had cheese, bacon and scrambled eggs over a light pizza crust. It didn’t look good on their website and didn’t look appetizing in the box.
It was just OK. It wasn’t terrible, but I haven’t finished it yet, even though we ordered just a small one.
Jeannette didn’t sample this one.
The pizza-for-breakfast people know this already. But what you want to do is have your regular leftover pizza in the morning and skip the breakfast pizza.
But the big adventure we did not get to last weekend is making homemade pizza. My plans to make two pizzas are shaped by a previous experience.
Years ago my sister Pat and I made homemade pizza. That left me as the top cook, which as you can guess doomed the project.
I remember the first crust being barely edible and the second one being much better, approaching mediocre.
In this latest effort Jeannette replaces me as top cook. That helps a lot, but I still think our second effort will beat the first.
We purchased everything we didn’t already have to make pizza: yeast for the crust, pepperoni slices, fresh mushrooms, Italian sausage and pizza cheese, mozzarella mixed with parmesan.
We also bought pizza sauce. We plan to use it on our first try at homemade pizza, but we plan to have homemade sauce for the second try. I got some pizza sauce recipes from friends on Facebook. We’ll put those to good use when we’re ready.
By the way, DeNiro’s had a lot more to say about pizza than I’ve told you already. I’ll include some of their tastier morsels and a few of my own Friday, as the Burton household gears up for a first try at DIY pizza. Stay tuned.
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