Picture it: Golden Girl Sophia Petrillo hard at work berating her daughter and making a kick-ass Italian dish.
Growing up, the kitchen was the room I skirted through to to get to the rest of the house. My mother and father are both excellent cooks, but whenever they would try to teach me a recipe or show me a culinary technique, I would brush them aside and proclaim that I would only have a microwave when I grew up.
I actually took delight in screwing up the simplest of dishes. I would boil my spaghetti until it was a congealed mass of gluten that I needed a knife to cut through and bragged about it to my friends as a proud member some unorthodox form of feminism that considered the ability to cook as a mark of weakness in the new world order.
How was I to know that I would grow up to be a woman with a bookshelf full of recipe books, and a pantry stuffed with appliances; who is consumed with the idea of throwing themed dinner parties and went through a “cornbread” phase?
In brief moments of lucidity away from the kitchen, when I’m not thinking about which oatmeal stout would be good to use in beer bread or if I should try making homemade raviolis again, I realize I have been possessed by some little old Italian lady (picture Sophia Petrillo from the Golden girls) who is always shoving food down her loved one’s throats, knows as many Italian curses as she does recipes, and believes in the superiority of homemade tomato sauce and thin crust pizza.
Hallelujah! She’s arrived at her point. When I caught wind of the Artisan Pizza class offered by PCAD, it was my inner, tiny, old, Italian lady that signed up immediately. For one brief and glorious afternoon under the supervisions of our patient instructor Betsey Gerstein Sterenfeld from Essen, we prepared fresh pizza dough and tomato sauce from scratch and combined artisan pizza toppings like asparagus and truffle oil, wine soaked figs and fennel, shrimp and cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and basil to make a variety of pizzas that surpassed all of my expectations and met even my inner Sophia’s.
So now I have come full circle, in a couple of weeks I will be going home with my new pizza peel and stone, with a swagger, tales of greatness, and some bottles of wine. I have promised my family a pizza feast and I will be making it in their kitchen.
