Sunday, October 30, 2022

Some News 🍕🍕

Hello Friends,

Today, Sunday, I will spend a good portion of the day in the kitchen preparing for our annual Halloween gathering, an event whose genesis can be traced five or so years back, when our house, which is located in a great trick-0r-treating neighborhood, with houses close together and no sidewalks to slow anyone down, became a natural post-candy gathering meetup location for friends who traveled from across town and beyond for the occasion.

I've made the same menu every year — soup, salad, bread — and for the past few years I've added some sort of pan pizza to the menu, too, which I pop in the oven immediately upon returning home.

I am mostly boring as a Halloween participant — I don't remember the last time I dressed up — but I do love seeing the creativity of others, and I love catching up with friends, standing around the kitchen, mugs of soup in hand.

Also, Friends, I have some news. I'm currently in the process of writing another cookbook, tentatively called "Pizza Every Friday", which will include 52 pizza and 52 salad recipes — one combination for every Friday of the year — as well as a few simple desserts.

The book will be organized seasonally and will include recipes for home oven, outdoor oven, Roman-style, Sicilian-style, Detroit-style, skillet pizzas and more. There will be both a yeast and a sourdough recipe for every style of pizza in the book, and recipes will include both gram and volume measurements.

If all goes as planned, it will be published in the spring of 2o24. I will be sure to keep you posted on all things pizza-book related, and if you have any thoughts — suggestions! favorite toppings! favorite salads! anything else! — I would love to hear them.

Finally, if you're looking to improve your homemade pizza, I've created an email course that covers the basics. If you've taken either of the email bread courses (yeast, sourdough), it's the same format: 1 email a day for about a week. It's free! Click here to enroll: Pizza School: 7 Secrets to Perfecting Pizza at Home.

A Simple Halloween Menu

This is what I'll be serving tomorrow:

Hummus + Veggies
Lentil Soup (a double or triple batch)
Fall Salad
Sicilian-Style Pizza
Snowy Owl Cupcakes (I use this cake + frosting recipe and these instructions.) In addition to the cupcakes, you'll need Oreos and some sort of orange and brown candy (such as Reese's Pieces or M&Ms) for the eyes and nose.