THE DISH ON THE DISH
According to Food & Wine Magazine, Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza each day. That's a lot of ground cover.
I also tend to think of pizza in geographical terms. As in, when I am in New York I eat a lot of it. When I am in Vancouver, I eat a lot of Chinese food. Never the other way around, that would be dumb. Frankly, I've never been excited about the quality of the pizza in this town, and having once lived 10 feet from a famous pizza parlour in NYC, I had even less reason to crave it whenever I was back in B.C.
So I have to admit that I probably would not have tried the little number shown yesterday in "Whose Dish is This?" had it not been for the fact that I came home from an appointment last week and found a box from Rocky Mountain Flatbread Co. waiting patiently on the doorstep of CityFood International headquarters -- the same adopt a stray pizza story as fessed up by Tim Pawsey in his column last week in the Courier.
Yes, both Tim and I bit the bait, and I was rather glad it happened that way because the pizza turned out quite all right. Well, let's qualify that - all right as far as a frozen, pre-assembled pizza can expect to be. If you don't have an extremely hot, and I mean (industrial level) hot oven, or even better, a wood-burning brick oven in your kitchen, you are at a disadvantage. Without the fast, intense heat of a pizza parlour's commercial oven, the crust never gets crisp enough nor the cheese melty enough before the bottom either starts to go hard or soggy and the toppings rubberize. The Rocky Mountain Flatbread version however, managed the heating process well and without the help of a clay baking tile placed underneath it.
No need to repeat Tim here, We'll let him fill you in on the details about the Rocky Mountain Flatbread Company in his article. Their one-serving sized, frozen pizza is a variation of the ones made at their Kitsilano restaurant and comes in three flavours: the sundried tomato and goat cheese, plus a chicken and a pepperoni version. You can find them in refrigerators belonging to various health-conscious grocers about town. I know for certain Capers stocks it.
Actually, from a marketing point of view, sending food to writers in their own caves and lairs isn't such a bad idea. If we've been locked inside on deadline we're pretty sick of our own cooking (making cassoulet from scratch for Tim, spooning from jars for me), and our high moral standards about accepting free food is but a moot point. We can't let perfectly good edibles go to waste now, can we? Although to a certain extent, eating unsolicited meals does make us vulnerable. I wrote an evil short story once about the revenge of a restaurateur, who in one day, bumped off all the food writers in town who had ever given his place a bad review by delivering Ex-Lax filled brownies to their offices in irresistible pink boxes with frilly ribbons.
But warning: don't try this idea on the food editor of Vancouver Magazine, you'll likely make a hit on the wrong person. When I used to be the Food Editor at Van Mag and Western Living, I often came to work and found cake boxes addressed to me, but with only a paper doily and a few crumbs left inside. No one ever admitted to the crime, but considering the estimated size of the cake by the grease ring on the doily, it must have been the lot of them. Blackguards! Or as New Yorkers would say, "You toucha my pizza, you take a walk under da Hudson".
