Food faves- Pizza

My food faves are starting to get just a bit predictable and unoriginal at this point. 'Seriously, pizza? Everyone's favourite food is pizza you boring ass!' You might say. But I'm going to carry on anyway.  

Pizza is the fallback food. If you need to grab a quick, failsafe dinner with a mate before the cinema, you choose from one of the 5 million Pizza Express joints on the high street for an American Hot and some dough balls. If you're late home from work and want something easy to eat in front of the box, you hit the supermarket for a goat's cheese and caramelised onion 12-inch with salad in a bag, garlic ciabatta and a bottle of red. If it's a Friday night, been a long week, and you just wanna pig out, it's a super large Pepperoni Passion from Dominos with ice-cream and a 2-litre bottle of coke. 

Pizza is something you can dress up or dress down and can be amazingly good or horrifically bad. At its best it's a wafer thin crust topped with simple, fresh ingredients. Good ol' buffalo mozzarella and torn basil will do me, but I do like parma ham, rocket and ricotta too. And salami. And pesto. I could go on... (I am now starving and salivating over the Pizza East menu). But at its worst, it's a 99p dry piece of cardboard from the freezer section of the corner shop, or a 3am cheese-laden grease monster jobbie topped with questionable meat from the chippie/fried chicken/burger place down the road.  

99c pizza in NYC...damn good

I would be lying if I said that the only variety of pizza to grace my lips is the fancy kind with the good ingredients and proper base. I wouldn't stick any old pizza in my mouth, but I will occasionally slink to the Friday night pig-out style pizza for a Dominos (well, it's Papa John's actually). Is it proper pizza, worthy of Naples finest pizzerias? No, it isn't. But it's a guilty pleasure that I'm happy to admit to.  

Determining which pizzas are good and bad is easy enough. Making pizza is a bit more of a challenge.   It's probably because my oven isn't nearly as hot as it should be, or perhaps I go overboard on the toppings but sometimes my pizzas come out looking like a hot mess. They're not as good as I can get elsewhere, so I tend not to make them very often. Either I get a brick oven, or I need to keep practising...

Homemade pizza in China, with some dubious toppings

Another homemade attempt, not so pretty, but tasted pretty good