Frommy’s World

This weekend my daughter Paytyn had a soccer tournament up in Seattle. The tournament was at a soccer haven called Starfire. This complex has four turf fields that are all lighted (including a stadim field), four more grass fields, two indoor fields, a pro shop, game room, and a pizzaria/pub with four flat screen televisions with all the weekend football and soccer games. After the first game on Friday we had dinner at the on site pizzaria. Because we were there the following afternoon we again had pizza for lunch. Later that Saturday night the girls had a league soccer match at Seattle Pacific University. While the game was coming to an end one of the parents said that they were ordering pizza for the team and picking it up and bringing it back to the hotel. This made it three meals in a row of nothing but pizza. Needless to say, my whife and kids were sick and tired of consuming pizza…However, not I.

When I was a child my parents spoiled me with love, attention, and plenty of homemade meals. Yes, many times those meals consisted of macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, soup, and frozen dinners, but my mom also put together some awesome homespun dinners. Fast food really wasn’t part of our typical diet until my teens. In fact, making a trip to McDonalds or another fast food joint would have been a treat or a reason of necessity. Then one evening my cousin Carl came to visit us from California. To celebrate we went out for pizza at a local pizza parlor in town.

Pizza was never a meal in my early youth that I was too interested in. My parents would order a combination pizza or Hawaiian pizza. These flavors never really turned me on. My dad also liked the occasional shrimp or hamburger and onion pizzas, but they just simply made me turn a shy eye…or maybe my stomach turn. This is where my cousin Carl comes into the picture. When we went to pizza with Carl that night my parents ordered their typical fare, but my cousin ordered pepperoni as the topping on his pizza. What happened next changed my life…cousin Carl offered me a piece of his pepperoni pizza.

Today pizza is my favorite food…pepperoni pizza to be specific. I would have to admit that my family eats pizza at least once a week. Than again, we eat other fast foods probably even more. But pizza has a special place in my heart, not to mention my stomach.

Pizza and party are almost synonymous. Almost every birthday I’ve ever had has been celebrated with pizza. Even the night before my wedding was celebrated at a pizza parlor. If you were to put together a sports banquet, where would it be celebrated? At a pizza parlor. Pizza was even my wife’s last meal before giving birth to our daughter Sophia (it’s great for inducing labor).

So what exactly is pizza? Literally translated, the word pizza means pie. American pizza has a round crust that is made with a yeasty dough covered with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and other ingredients, such as peppers, onions, Italian sausage, mushrooms, anchovies or of course pepperoni.

The first introduction to pizza in the United States is said to have come from an Italian immigrant named Gennaro Lombardi. He opened a small grocery store in New York City’s “Little Italy”. An employee of his (Antonio Totonno Pero) began making pizza as an item to sell at Lombardi’s store. It became one of the most popular items sold at the store, so much so that he opened the first American pizzeria in 1905 on Spring Street named “Lombardi’s”. Totonno opened his own pizzeria on Coney Island in 1924. Other pizzerias opened up around the United States, but its popularity was limited to mostly Italians immigrants.

Pizza finally crossed cultures within the Unites States when soldiers brought the idea back from Italy at the end of World War II. American soldiers ate the dish up during their Italian campaign and brought their appreciation for the dish back home. The singer Dean Martin’s famous 1953 song “Amore” later cemented pizza’s rising popularity with its opening line “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”.

The term pizza parlor replaced pizzeria when the California restaurant chain Shakey’s Pizza opened up in 1954. Pizza Hut was also founded this same year in Wichita Kansas. Eventually Round Table Pizza made its debut and later home delivery chains like Domino’s, Little Caesar’s, and Papa John’s shifted the emphasis away from dine in pizza parlors towards eating freshly baked pizza at home. Even Pizza Hut and local pizza parlors have shifted there emphasis toward home delivery.

Why pizza is the best food ever!

Taste
Now I know that taste is personal, but there isn’t any other food that makes my mouth water like pizza. For some people it might be chocolate or maybe some other food, but my happy food is pizza.

Easy to make
Pizza is also a fairly simple item to make. Find your favorite crust recipe and the rest is simply picking out whatever topping you like. You can also simply buy pre made crusts or use French bread or beagles to hold your toppings.

Variety
Is there any other food that has as many varieties that pizza provides? You can literraly place any topping on a pizza and it would still be a pizza. Not to mention there are deep dish pizzas, New York style pizzas, California pizzas, Sicilian style pizza, crisp crust, and Calizone (omelet) style pizzas.

Delivery
What other food can you have delivered for you almost anywhere within the United States? Some delivery places are even open till the wee hours of the night making pizza a perfect late night snack.

Frozen pizza
Is there a better frozen food? I’ve tried many different frozen dinners and other entrees, but none of them have ever compared to the quality of a good frozen pizza.

Leftovers
My family has a tendency to keep leftover dinners in our fridge, but none of them ever get eaten. Pizza, on the other hand, always makes a second trip for a good meal. In fact, I love cold pizza for breakfast the next day!

Price
Pizza is one of those meals I can literally feed my entire family of four kids for twenty dollars or less. Pizza parlors always have certain days of the week where you can get a lot of pizza for little money and pizza coupons are as easy to find as are pizza parlors themselves.

Safe bet
If you were ever in a small town as a visitor and needed to find somewhere to go out to eat, pizza is by far your safest bet. Even bad pizza is edible. Although, the gourmet hamburger restaurant chain Red Robin once served a pizza on their menu that was pretty god-awful.

Family
Pizza is also a meal that brings the family together. Weather it’s dine-in, carryout, or delivery, pizza has a way of getting the family to gather. Not a small feat in the 21st century.

Best selling author Eric Shlosser began his book “Fast Food Nation” talking about the United States’ top-secret underground military base at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. He reported how Domino’s Pizza makes deliveries almost every night to this military base where deadly force is authorized on any intruders. Eric Shlosser writes:

“And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization—Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of a Domino’s pizza box.”

My college dorm room ceiling was a mosaic of many Domino’s pizza box tops collected throughout my freshman year. This memorial became part of one of the best years of my life and truly gave clues to the nature of college dorm life. Since that fateful day when my cousin Carl introduced me to a pepperoni topped pizza, pizza has been a significant part of my diet. One average slice of cheese pizza has 290 calories, 39 grams of carbohydrates, 15 grams of protein, and 9 grams of fat. When adding toppings you can make your pizza healthy or downright fattening. You can even add toppings to make your pizza a dessert. Whether it’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, desert, parties, delivery, carryout, dine-in, frozen, by the slice, deep dish, thin crust, folded, super markets, small pizzerias, large restaurant chains, malls, movie theaters, home, college, industry, office buildings, and military fortresses…pizza is simply unsurpassed in the American food empire.

Adding a little spice to life, tonight my wife Tara made tacos with fresh homemade salsa. The salsa was good, even my neighbor came over to dip some chips. Dinner itself was fairly uneventful; however what followed was a series of unfortunate and interesting events that lead to the Emergency Room. This would be the fourth time in six years that my wife had been taken to the ER. The first time it was for a car wreck, the second time for falling off a ladder while painting our living room, the third was for being bitten by a spider that crawled up her pajama pants, and now once again for cutting up chili peppers and handling them with her bare hands.

After dinner I heard Tara call for me from the other room. As I came into the kitchen she began to inform me that her hands and arms were burning. She believed it was from the chili peppers she used in making the salsa. With a smirk I asked her if she had ran her hands under cold water. She told me not only water, but also vinegar. I said to try baking soda and water…that’s what my mom would have me do when I got stung by a bee. A little while later she came to me again and said that her hands were still burning. I said, “No fear, I’ll get on the Internet and find a cure.”

Tara had made salsa before, but this time she decided to use a hotter chili pepper to spice things up. Tara also made a bigger batch so she cut up four chilies instead of just the usual one. To top it off, she didn’t use gloves when cutting the chili peppers.

According to ChiliPepperPlants.com, the substance that produces all of the heat sensation in chili peppers is known as capsaicin. Specialized gland cells found in the ribs of a chili pepper produce capsaicin. Capsaicin produces the sensations of heat and pain in the mouth by stimulating local heat receptors in the skin and mucous membranes. Capsaicin also makes you sweat, which is why it is popular in hot dry climates. Apparently capsaicin was developed by plants as a way of preventing animals from eating the seeds of the pepper. Chili peppers with more capsaicin produce more pain, the “hottest” being the habanero pepper.

To measure the heat level of chili peppers, the “Scoville” test is used. The heat factor of chili peppers is measured in multiples of Scoville units. Sweet bell peppers at zero Scoville units, while the mighty Habanero pepper rates at 300,000 plus Scoville units! Pure Capsaicin rates between 15,000,000 and 16,000,000 Scoville Units!

I learned by researching the Internet that when using fresh or dried chili peppers, it is highly suggested that you wear gloves to protect your hands because the oils in the peppers can cause severe burns (My wife got this information a little too late). Also, don’t touch your face or eyes!

Coming to the rescue, I promptly informed my wife that I found a cure. WebMD said:

“Chili pepper burns are caused by an irritating substance found in the skin of the pepper. This burn can feel like a sunburn, a throbbing and prickling feeling, or a very intense, hot pain.

“The best treatment is to wash the area with soap and water and then put a large amount of vegetable oil on the area for at least an hour. If the burn sensation is on your hands, dip
your hands in vegetable oil for the hour.”

Tara began to treat herself with half a bottle of vegetable oil that covered her hands and arms. After about 15 minutes she still complained of severe burning. My wife than began to make some phone calls: The pharmacist said, “vegetable oil wouldn’t do a thing”. He recommended ice water and a possible trip to the Emergency Room if the burning persisted. My wife’s doctor also recommended a possible trip to the ER.

I did some further research and found a recommendation to soak hands in a bowl of milk. Tara tried the milk bath and found it to be the most soothing, yet the pain continued. After a large dose of Benadryl, some ibuprofen, vicadin, and a last ditch treatment of butter, we finally decided to make a trip to the ER.

Chili peppers originated in South America, and then spread to Central America where they are most popular today. Chili peppers were among the first plants to be domesticated. According to an essay “Red Hot Chili Peppers” by Tom Giesler, the remains of a pepper were found in Mexico dating back to approximately 7000 B.C., showing that chili peppers were established long before Columbus arrived. When Columbus landed in the New World, he named the chile “peppers” because they spiced up the bland food he and his sailors had been eating just the way black pepper did.

The seeds of the chili pepper were brought back to Spain, where it was grown in monastery gardens. Eventually, Portuguese traders then spread the chili peppers to the rest of the world.

While most people know the chili pepper as a food, it had other uses in ancient times. According to Chili Peppers-Some like it Hot, the pre-Columbian Indians used chili peppers as a medicine, as a punishment for children (inhalation of the smoke of burning chili peppers), and as a kind of tear gas during warfare (chili peppers were burned and the smoke blown by the wind over to enemy lines).

One chili pepper provides one and a half times more the amount of vitamin C found in a orange and is also a good source of vitamins A and E. According to BellyBytes.com, today chili peppers are used for a number of different things: as a sore throat cure, for neck aches, headaches, rheumatoid arthritis, tumors, as a blood clot preventive, boosting the immune system, as a food preservative because of its strong antioxidant properties, as a safe food-coloring, and as a flavoring for such products as ginger ale, to clear sinuses, and also aiding in digestion.

According to Science Daily, the chemical capsaicin found in chili peppers puts the sting in pepper spray, and is used in pest repellent sprays as well. Chile peppers have become the most widely used spice in the world, and are eaten on a daily basis by at least one quarter of the world’s adult population.

Studies have shown that eating spicy food is addicting. Your brain interprets the pain signals from hot chilies and automatically releases endorphins (the body’s natural pain killer). This creates a temporary feeling of euphoria. Hot and spicy food lovers soon begin to crave this feeling and become hooked! Fizzy drinks like Coke also release endorphins.

The pain produced by the chili peppers my wife cut up were too intense and left welts on her hands and arms. The only endorphins that were going to work on her were going to have to be administered by a doctor. The ER doctor concluded that Tara was having an allergic reaction to the chilies and not just a chemical burn. By the time it was all over, my wife was given an IV filled with steroids, more Benadryl, and some serious painkillers…also the learned experience that you should never handle hot chili peppers without gloves, and that I should assume to expect more various adventures to the ER in future years.