If Martha Stewart were a 40-ish widow in rural Ohio, the result would be Suzanne Dietz, heroine of Bedeviled Eggs by Laura Childs (official site). Suzanne is one of three partners in The Cackleberry Club, an adorable breakfast/lunch/tea restaurant with an adorable bookstore nook, an adorable knitting supplies nook, and a slew of adorable community activities. Her partners and best friends are Petra, who does the actual cooking, and Toni, who seems to be the town wild child.

In this book, third in the series, an adorable community event (“read dating”) turns sour when a mayoral candidate is murdered. Some of the murder-related scenes (and their aftermaths) are so grim that the extreme coziness starts to read like Dietz’s deliberate pushback against a harsh small-town reality, though the character’s not self-aware on that level.

What this book supplied, along with so much adorability that I feel a lingering guilt at not decorating for minor holidays, is a slew of tempting egg dishes. One is a breakfast pizza that sounds remarkably like the famous Kum & Go breakfast pizza but turns out to be made with biscuit dough. This was a must-try. And it just calls for a little swing, with Hilary Lester and Mick the Knife covering Dean Martin.

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New Jersey is all about the pizza.

The pizza it’s all about is not the pizza I know. It is a pizza with the sauce above the toppings. Rising to this occasion required special goodies, including taking a running leap at Jamie Oliver’s pizza crust recipe (here), which works and is a lot better than any prefab crust I’ve tried.

Of course, New Jersey is all about location, location, location. So today’s band is Real Estate (official site), a sunny lo-fi psychedelic pop band from Ridgewood, NJ. Let’s start with “Out of Tune.”
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Whitesnake has been on my mind, a state of being that called for white pizza. There’s no snake on the pizza, as if there were, everybody would just claim it tastes like chicken, so it seemed simpler to use chicken in the first place.

Also, there was chicken in the freezer, while I have not yet quite evolved to being the sort of Arizonan who runs around the yard killing snakes with a hoe.

Whitesnake should properly be on one’s mind at least occasionally, as VH-1 named it the 85th greatest hard rock band of all time, a factoid that should make us grateful for the existence of music geeks who can take care of determining the fine distinctions between #83 (King’s X) and #86 (Foreigner). People who know me well will grasp that I’m not snarking: without music geekery, it’d be much tougher to figure out any larger patterns beyond one’s own preferences. Also, the band has a new album this year, Forevermore, which reputedly had bigger presales than Britney Spears’ latest oeuvre.

So are we ready to caramelize an onion?

Damn, that sounded dirty.

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This pizza, like revenge, is a dish best eaten cold.

It’s from Gasper’s, which serves the only really good Italian food in Phoenix, along with the truly addictive Vesuvio pizza. I hied myself hither following an afternoon at the most adorable little movie theater in the Scottsdale hinterlands, where I saw Henry’s Crime, which is arguably a comic caper movie about revenge, lightly refrigerated.

Or is it? Read as a caper film, the movie is light amusement. Read it as a parable of the relationship between audience and entertainer — and Keanu Reeves’ legendary perpetual deadpan becomes a slyly brilliant symbol. Read the rest of this entry »

I was completely wrong about Salt River Stadium at Talking Stick serving fry bread. It does have a Southwestern food stand, which I passed up, as if I’m going to pay $9 for a burrito, it had better include prawns and vodka-chipotle sauce, neither of which was on offer. I never did figure out what cuisine was meant to represent the Colorado Rockies, as no place seemed to be serving bear.

This was my first foray to the spanking new stadium in Scottsdale — well, technically on the Pima-Maricopa reservation — to see the Diamondbacks play the Rockies. If you think I was there to root for the Diamondbacks, think again. Nobody roots for the Diamondbacks. The Diamondbacks exist as bait to lure real teams to play in Arizona.

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Faced with the sort of data-gathering exercise in which achieving exciting results requires a session of unutterably tedious work, I thought last night might be the time to replicate the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce recipe I’d found at Justin Can Cook. It’s simple. It requires no supervision for almost an hour. And it offers lovely flexible results.

My original plans for the sauce dictate a theme today of Songs about Pizza. It turns out that pizza is culturally loaded, and by that I don’t mean pepperoni, mushrooms, and extra cheese. I mean (for our amuse bouche) ska-punk-synthpop nostalgia by The Aquabats!, whose conceit is that the band is a team of superheroes saving the world through music. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a plum-prawn-pesto pizza.

The surreal tone of this pizza positively requires Nicole Atkins (listen), who has a new album coming out in January, presumably to meet the “all my presents were boring, but Gramps gave me cash money” edgy market. She is currently on a tour that draws a neat loop around Phoenix whilst carefully avoiding it. I feel unhip, or perhaps peeved, perplexed, and put-upon. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday morning seems to require something beyond daintily nibbling fingers of toast, so I bethought myself to check into breakfast pizza. Most variants involved scrambled eggs, and if I’m going to scramble an egg, I’m then going to stop and eat it. Then I found this variant from smittenkitchen.

Brunch calls for jazz, a genre I generally dislike, but it seems I can be sold on it (or at least convinced to rent it overnight) by Jamie Cullum (download a free track!). Read the rest of this entry »

A post on Serious Eats about Totino’s pizza rolls–which I devoured as a child but loathe as an adult–led to the burning question of whether it’s possible to make a less artificial version at home.

Burning questions imply disco infernos… well, in my defense of current hippity hoppity CHR hits, I’d argued that disco was worse. But I recall very little of disco other than an occasional random exclamation of “do the hustle!” Ignorance not being precisely bliss, I checked out Disco Savvy’s list of the best disco songs of all time to see what cream rose to the top. Here I learned four things. First: Barry Manilow, who is roughly my parents’ age, can still do the hustle (in a red velvet sequined blazer, no less): Read the rest of this entry »