Stories

I grew up eating my fair share of great Chicago pizza. My family made the drive from St. Paul to Chicago a few times each year to visit all the relatives living there. Laden with spicy Italian sausage and creamy cheese that stretched in long strings as I pulled the slice away from my mouth, I thought Chicago pizza was the best food in the world.

With that in mind, I feel a little silly calling this concoction of mine a pizza. It’s nothing like the Chicago pizza I grew up on. But it is on a flat piece of dough with several ingredients piled on top along with mozzarella cheese.

Arugula on my pizza was only a thought after I’d prepared an Arugula Salad for this week’s newspaper column. I had a small amount of the green ingredients left from the salad — arugula, spinach and tiny fresh green peas. Along with a few other little odds and ends from my refrigerator, I decided to create a pizza.

I'll admit it, even though I find most of the recipes atrocious, I am fascinated by the Pillsbury Bake-Off. Every two years the contest is held with much fanfare and prizes, including a million dollar grand prize. The judges are generally food editors and choose recipes based on taste, appearance, creativity and consumer appeal, but because the recipes use packaged "convenience" foods, they often end up sounding bizarre. Samosa Taquitos with Apricot Chutney Sauce, anyone? Or Huevos Rancheros Pizza?

The Ungarnished Truth: A Cooking Contest Memoir "A Woman, A Chicken Dinner, A Million Dollars" is out now in paperback and I devoured the book in two sittings. Bake-off grand prize winner and author Ellie Matthews is smart, funny and very engaging. Her story gives an almost unbelievable level of detail on her road to the win. But even if she never won anything, you would want to read about this quirky and down to earth woman (who shocked everyone by not jumping up and down or screaming when she won).

We went for a cocktail-hour potluck last week at Paule and Flavia’s place. They’re both architects and they live in a house of their own design in the medieval village of Poreta.

We had been to visit them once before and I pretty much sort of knew where it was. It was up this steep little street, I remembered. Well, it’s not a street; it’s more like steps that you walk up but cars use it, too. It’s a medieval thing. I have driven up a number of stairways in my time, in quaint European villages, but never intentionally.

So, we parked at the bottom and trudged up the steps in the direction of the twelfth century castle that crowns the hill. I figured I’d recognize Paule and Flavia’s place when I saw it. By the time we got to the top of the hill, I thought I had seen three possible candidates but no clear winner.

We walked back down the steps, which was a lot easier than going up but Jill was tiring of carrying the bowl of hummus and the plate of raw vegetables that we were adding to the lucky pot. I carried the wine, which is a husbandly duty.

Tis the season for reflection on the past year, so we asked our contributors to tell us what their favorite bite or meal was of 2011. The one thing we all love is food and there's nothing better than sharing great food with the ones you love. Wishing you many delicious bites in 2012!

It is white truffle season, so naturally, anything with finely sliced white truffles would be memorable, but this year I made Cacio e Pepe – a delicate Roman pasta recipe made with egg tagliolini, butter (or olive oil), Cacio de Roma (a mild goat cheese) grated Romano, and lots of freshly grated black pepper. Combined with white truffles it becomes the ultimate sophisticated melt-in-your-mouth comfort food… and the aroma! Heaven! – Nancy Ellison

The favorite thing I ate in 2011 was, without a doubt, a nectarine I had just bitten into when Obama came on TV and told us that Bin Laden was dead.  And while I admit that even a bowl of gravel would've tasted delicious upon hearing that the world was rid of this scum bag, I also remember thinking that now there was at least one more nectarine for someone else to enjoy which leads me to believe that it was an outstanding piece of fruit in its own right. – Alan Zweibel

If I see that any of my 600 Facebook friends, (of whom I really only know 14), are in New York, I tell them, “Don’t miss the cheeseburger at Prune!” – Fredde Duke