Old Habits Die Hard

It’s not that my family and I are savages because we never make it to the dinner table before we’ve picked at every food cooking on the stove. We’re all guilty of standing up while we eat because we love food too much to sit down and wait for it to reach our plates. We make it to the dinner table eventually, but not before our fingers get a little dirty. My mom usually asks my sister or me to set the dinner table, and we only half set it before we’re back to dipping our fingers in the pots and pans. We don’t always care about what’s for dinner as long as we’re with each other. I knew this was true the time my sister made mashed cauliflower in high school as a substitute for mashed potatoes. I supported her adventurous side until I remembered how much she bullied me throughout my life and I said, “This sucks.” I got in trouble for using that phrase, but at least Lauren never made cauliflower again.

My perfect meal doesn’t take place at the dining room table of my house where the crystal chandelier hangs above the vanilla-scented-candle display and the silk red tablecloth. It’s in the kitchenette, where I’m surrounded by lime green walls with white trimming and framed, sepia-toned pictures of foods like hard eggs and onions. It’s the closest to abstract artwork that we own, and it looks out of place against the walls that haven’t been repainted since we moved to the south side of Chicago in 1991.

We’ve had the same kitchen since I was two years old. It’s the one room in the house that my mom never considers remodeling. My mom, dad, sister and I sat for dinner here every night of the week before my sister went to college two years before me. My sister and I fought each other for the brown bench against the wall because we didn’t like sitting in the black chairs that made us feel like grown ups. I can trace the start of our rocky relationship back to the nights we fought over that uncomfortable bench that neither of us enjoys anymore.

The dining room table was reserved for family barbecues, birthdays and other holidays. Or whenever my mom entertained guests like our parish priest Father Raftery, who I informed at dinner one night that my mom was making us strawberry daiquiris for dessert. I forgot to tell him they were virgin and my mother reprimanded me for that later. She also loved to entertain my grade school friends; our idea of a good time rarely coincides even today, but we both agreed that whenever my girlfriends came to the house for sleepovers, we would make homemade pizza. I was proud of her when she made it. It’s one of the few foods that has the power to make me angry once it fills my belly to the point where I can’t consume any more. I always regret eating more than I can stomach the next morning, but it’s worth it in the moment.

My idea of a perfect meal starts with who I spend my time with in the kitchen; my mom did most of the cooking when I was younger, a role my dad has assumed since the success of his breakfast taco experiments gave him the confidence he needs to cook more ambitious foods. I wanted to cook this meal with my mom because I didn’t spend much time with her in the kitchen as a kid; I was curious to know how to make her flan, her Mexican rice, her rice pudding, but she was a working mom who didn’t always have the patience to teach me the recipes when she got back from work. But pizza was one of the simplest recipes she had, so I almost always had a role in preparing it.

I traveled back home to Chicago this weekend to create my perfect meal with my parents. My mom and I shopped at Trader Joe’s—a quirky grocery store that serves a good selection of organic food where the cashiers wear Hawaiian shirts to work and say things like “Cowabunga dude!” They’re all about cutting costs and keeping it cool, according to my mom. We bought a box of organic spinach greens, a yellow onion, mushrooms, red bell peppers, tomatoes on the vine, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, and BelGioioso fresh mozzarella cheese. We already had the dough ingredients, salt, pepper, and extra virgin olive oil at home.

I prepared the dough in the food processor before cooking the pizza toppings so it had time to rise (When I was younger, my mom would let the dough rise for several hours and sometimes we made it by hand.). I added warm water, yeast, and flour before we pulsed it and let it mix together and form a sticky white ball. I placed it in a glass bowl sprayed with non-stick spray, covered it with plastic wrap, and waited an hour or so until it was ready.

Next was the reason I loved pizza as a kid: the fumes that filled the kitchen from cooking the onion, spinach, peppers, and mushrooms, even though I didn’t allow them on my pizza at the time. Red bell pepper is one of those underappreciated foods that I misunderstood in grade school, but that I make all kinds of excuses to incorporate into my meals now. We placed the peppers on all four burners and let the flesh of the peppers grow a dark black jacket that we later stripped away along with the seeds inside. After those were finished, we cooked down the spinach, mushrooms, and onions.

We assembled everything that we wanted on the pizza in bowls before I rolled the dough, often a source of anxiety in grade school because I felt incompetent when my mom was forced to reroll what I thought was a good circle. An even greater challenge was transferring the dough onto the pizza paddle. Then we added the toppings; first the spinach, then the onions, mushrooms, sun-dried and vine tomatoes.

I still feel like a kid when I make pizza with my mom because I ask for her approval on the thickness of the dough, the amount of olive oil I should spread on it before I lay the toppings on, and if the amount of mozzarella cheese I crumble on top is excessive. Even if she tells me the crust is too thin, the way I like it, or if there’s too much cheese, I follow my own instincts.

I’m reminded of the beauty of cooking with color and the artistic value of food when I make pizza; it’s a painter’s palette of crimson, forest green, golden yellow, sepia, ivory. It proves that an ordinary dish can be beautiful. Even though my mother’s pizza is more sophisticated than it was in the years I did the five-minute walk to school from my front steps, old habits die hard. We still picked at the vegetables while they were cooking in the pan. We turned on the oven light every few minutes to watch the mozzarella cheese melt and blanket the vegetables. We ate standing up and made loud noises as we licked our fingers. We skipped the salad so we had room for the maximum amount of pizza. We ate strawberries for dessert because my mom never bought ice cream and cookies when I was a kid. We talked at the dinner table about my life in college that sometimes feels so removed from my life back home. We watched the last colors of the palette disappear before we submitted to the couch, holding our stomachs with both hands.