TBD but I am leaning towards home made pizza

 

I really like home made pizza, I have an Ooni Koda pizza oven that I use during warm weather months. I miss using it but it is too cold outdoors for winter use. I would love one right now lol

 

I don't have a dedicated pizza oven I just use a pizza stone in the oven when I am at home. Currently visiting mom in Seattle since July so I just heated up a cookie sheet in the oven at the max heat for an hour or so before putting the pizza in the oven so I could get a sear on the bottom of the crust..

 

Cooking a good pizza in a basic home oven takes a bit of work, you seem to have mastered it well, a pizza stone can work just as well as you have noted, lots of heat helps.

My Ooni Koda isn't anything fancy but I like it because it gets up over 700 degrees, I still need to preheat it for 20+ minutes even at those temps as it has as a stone in it. It makes a fully cooked pizza in 90 seconds, easy to burn it if you leave it too long., and it has taken some practice to get used to all that heat.

 

Corn dogs, my son wants a couple so I tossed one in for myself.

 

Nice!! I'm cooking up some skinless chicken breast and am going to have some rigatoni with it and an italian salad. (not antipasto)

 

Our version of an Italian salad growing up was basically two kinds, red and green versions. When Roma tomatoes were in season we sliced them up and drizzled them with olive oil and liberal amounts of dried oregano. After sitting for a few minutes the olive oil, tomato seeds and liquid would mix at the bottom of the dish. We soaked up the juice in the dish with a nice crusty bread, still one of my favourite salads when local tomatoes are fresh and flavourful (not the cheap plastic type tomatoes you get from Florida yuck)

Our green salads were made with bitter greens, we called them Chikoria, I think they are listed as Chickory in english. I swear my parents picked them as weeds from our front and rear lawns, lol, Red wine vinegar was used in copious amounts, usually because my Dad's home-made wine often turned to vinegar each year, horrid stuff. His wine had plenty of sediment in it, and he detested store bought wine. Even if it was the finest wine in the world worth a thousand dollars a bottle he would say his wine was better lol. You can take the peasant out of the peasant country but you can't take the peasant life out of the peasant. They always ate their salad last during the meal, I grew up thinking that was normal, but to this day I don't know anyone else who ever did that, lol. I thought the vinegar in the salad was meant to help with digestion, but what did we know for God's sake ?

 

My Mom used to take the tomato's from the garden and slice them up and put on some basil, she used to call it something like vasigkneegol , and her homemade oil and vinegar and some mozzarella it was nice on a hot day.

 

Oh yeah we would use fresh torn basil on the tomato salads too - my parents also pronounced it as vasilico , which is basilico where the b was given a v sound, just their their way of saying basil in a slang sort of way.

That is a nice summer salad you are right, I still try to make it at home with my wife, and she is hooked on it too despite her being Portuguese.