Pizza!

A Mathews Pizza -- there's that basil again!

 When I was little my mom used to pronounce pizza just like it's spelled with a short "i" and two "z"s.  It drove my brother Charles crazy.  We usually only had pizza on Sunday nights and it was the bad Totino's frozen kind which I'm pretty sure was the ONLY kind back in the seventies.  The pepperoni was cut into teeny-tiny little cubes and the crust could easily be confused with the box the pizza came in.  We loved it and thought it was delicious.  Usually, my brother Morgan and I ate our scrumptious frozen pizza in the dining room while watching The Wonderful World of Disney on a small black and white TV while my parents ate in the kitchen watching 60 minutes.  Back in those long ago days before Netflix or cable and any television reception came thanks to the wonders of the very large antenna on our roof, Sunday was the only night that we didn't all eat sitting together at the long kitchen bar with the nightly news on in the background.  Sunday nights were fun.

I still love pizza.  It's probably my desert island food but I am a little more particular about the pizza that I eat.  Well particular in that I like qualifying pizza as either "good" pizza or "bad" pizza.  I'll still eat "bad" pizza though if it's available.

I have a lot of favorite pizzas.  Pizzas are like friends.  I have lots of friends, they're all different and I love them all for different reasons.  If I had to choose a BPF (that's Best Pizza Forever is you couldn't figure it out), I'd probably pick Joe Bologna's.  We've been going to Joe B's my whole life -- decades before they moved to the old synagogue on Maxwell.  In fact, my brothers took me to Joe B's for pizza before I had my wisdom teeth taken out in 9th grade.  It was really sweet of them -- kind of a last supper. 

I also love Andolini's in Mt. Pleasant, SC.  I don't know that it's actually the pizza that I like so much there or if it's just how fun it is to go there without fail after the Cooper River Bridge Run every year to eat pizza and drink pitcher beer with abandon -- something I never do in my real life! 

Mary Rollins, of course, loves Goodfellas downtown.  It's part of her "urban artsy girl" style.  She and the ballet girls adore the whole idea of downtown life and pizza by the slice.  

I think Marc likes Miguel's in the Gorge the best.   Sometimes I question if he only likes to go hiking because hiking always includes lunch at Miguel's.  You can get anything on your Miguel's pizza.  Seriously, think of something, I bet they have it as a topping.

Lately, we've been having pizza at home more.  And no, not the Totino's frozen kind.  We've been making our own pizza.  I'll buy the Pillsbury refrigerated thin crust pizza dough and dress it up with whatever we've got on hand.  I rarely use a tomato sauce base (learned that at Miguel's) as typically I have leftover homemade Alfredo sauce, or ranch dressing, or pesto in on hand that I top with lots of veggies -- onions, fresh peppers, roasted peppers from the jar,  Kalmata olives, sundried tomatoes, a sprinkle of garlic and bacon or Italian sausage (I seem to always have Italian sausage links in my refrigerator, does everyone?).  fresh basil and now I throw on pine nuts, too, because what doesn't taste better with pine nuts?!  Will, who likes Little Caesar's Pizza (probably the only pizza I really dislike--bad, very bad) requires that one corner of the pizza be left veggie-free.  Actually, Will prefers his whole dinner plate to be veggie-free.  Then our masterpiece is topped off with lots and lots of CHEESE!  I hear we have a reputation for being a cheese loving people at the Mathews' house.

Maybe the best part of pizza (along with the cheese) is that I never seem to eat it alone.  It's such a celebratory food and food always seems to taste better when shared with someone else. 

What's your favorite pizza?

Indian Stairway

My minions

 


Queens of the Hill!





Spider Monkey demonstrating his beast climbing skills on the Indian Stairway



"I get up with a little help from my friends"...MR helps Christina overcome a slight fear of heights



Are y'all coming up?



This picture makes me think, "Yeah!"



My butt's not actually THAT big...it's just my fanny pack.



We found the Flintstone's Living Room!!  The latest in pre-historic furniture design!

Pretty....

Frog's Head.  So...we were amazed as we were told we'd go past a formation that looked like a Frog's head.  Wow...

Still happy.  The point we climbed up from was to the right of the photo and we hiked around the ridge.  We went past several rock houses we climbed down to (Flintstone's Living room) and then climbed back up to the ridge.

You can barely see the Frog Head across the ridge top in this photo.  Sadly, people had carved their initials and other unsavory things on his little head.  Bad vandals...

Adena Arch

Huh...well it turns out I hadn't ever been to the trail called Indian Stairway!  I think where I had been before was actually a place called "Cloudsplitter".  While I have a bit of a  tendency to live in the moment and think that whatever thing I'm doing, book I'm reading, Christmas tree I'm decorating, is the best ever, I think that Indian Stairway, might just be THE BEST TRAIL EVER (in the Gorge at least...thanks for pointing that out yesterday Will...we have hiked cooler trails out West -- that would actually be in the Virgin River in Zion Canyon, Utah!!)  Anyway...where was I...Indian Stairway, perhaps one of the best trails in the Gorge?  It definitely is at the top of the list and Mary Rollins said it was the best trail she'd ever hiked there!

I've heard about Indian Stairway for years but never hiked it because I couldn't figure out where it was.  It's not an "official" trail and I sometimes tend toward disorientation so I've hiked multiple other trails instead of the trail I'm looking for when my minions start to get irritated with my losted-ness.  But, yesterday, we struck gold and I found some awesome directions on the Internet which I copied and pasted into an email I sent to myself so we could keep looking at them in the phone while hiking  I was feeling pretty clever and while I suppose I could have printed them I'm trying to be paper conscious.  Also, I made sure that I had the message downloaded in my phone BEFORE we got out of cell phone coverage which happens pretty quickly in eastern Kentucky.

We did have a few "lost" moments even with the great directions and my iPhone compass and we only nearly took one wrong turn off a cliff (my bad...MR was leading the way and I was trusting her sense of direction as it's usually spot on!) and we found many many geological jewels along the way.  Will and Wyatt said they saw a wolf/coyote (MR sand I suspect it was a squirrel--it is easy to confuse them) and asked me for his pocket knife I was carrying to defend themselves.  Sadly, I could not find it in my bag at that very moment, so I gave him a ball point pen I was carrying.  The boys seemed quite pleased with that as a weapon and scampered ahead on the trail while Christina, MR and I went back for a fanny pack inadvertently left at the bottom of the Indian Stairway.  We made a loop hiking the ridge top with GORGEous views, hiked along a section of the trail that had us on the cliff's edge -- definitely not a trail for small children -- and ultimately ended up back on the Sheltowee Trail and back to our car.  In all, I suspect we hiked about 6 miles.

And a good time was had by all (except Will who claims he'll never go hiking with me again because I don't do what he says...)

"Tent City" behind Miguel's.

And, to end the day:  Miguel's pizza.  Hooray!!  We saw license plates from: Utah, California, Ontario, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio and Connecticut.