How raising a baby is like making pizza

baby in pizza costume
From peopleinpizzaslicecostumesbecomingpizzas.com.

Some of you may know me as the founder of Slice, the long-running weblog dedicated to pizza, which is now a part of Serious Eats. One thing I’ve learned over the years of pizzablogging (yes, Margot, pizzablogging is a thing, a weird, weird thing) is that everyone has his or her own way to make pizza and everyone’s way is THE RIGHT WAY. That is to say, if you don’t mix a dough, stretch it out, top it, or bake it the way John Q. Pizzanerd does it, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Variables like bake times, dough hydration, and seemingly innocuous things like whether you put sugar in your tomato sauce spark fierce debate.

My wife and I observed something similar in babyland when we were in the hospital shortly after Margot’s birth. Especially around issues of breastfeeding. Continue reading “How raising a baby is like making pizza”

‘College town pizza,’ Lawrence, Kansas, 1992

To me, “college town pizza” (University of Kansas — Rock Chalk Jayhawk!) will always be Pizza Shuttle, Gumby’s (since closed), Papa Keno’s, and Rudy’s. (Pyramid was for folks in the Greek system.)

Rudy’s was as close to what J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, writing on Slice, describes as “college town pizza,” which he defines as pizza being over-topped and over-cheesed. Except that kids at KU tended to not overtop it — at least not those who I knew. Not because we were enlightened pizza purists looking to avoid a “garbage pie” but because it cost more. We were cheap bastards. Like most college kids. Hell, we’d rather spend our money on beer. (In my case, beer and pinball.)

Pizza Shuttle and Gumby’s were delivery and take-out only. I don’t know anyone who ever went to pick it up. If you owned a car, by the time you were in a state to actually crave Pizza Shuttle or Gumby’s, you had no business behind the wheel. Continue reading “‘College town pizza,’ Lawrence, Kansas, 1992”