Pizza Oven: Cooking Fire in the House

Pizza Oven restored and made to work for us this night!

While America bleeds and George Bush stumbles and mumbles......I am here, where tonight we fired up the huge stone pizza oven we have .....inside the kitchen of our house. Earlier in the year we did a big cleaning and restoration of this old pizza, or really just an old baking oven. We were waiting for the right moment and tonight came quickly and suddenly to be the night. Clouds hang over the island. The air is cool and the oven fire in the old house is very magical and sweet. I remembered to get in the auto and run out and get beer at the last minute, minutes before they closed. Meanwhile Filippo had gone into town to buy the big long opizza shovel, but they only had the one for bread. He brought that one home with him. It was ok for taking the pizza out. To put the pizza in we used a wide and floured cutting board (which we made last year from an old wood cabinet)….Silvia floured the board and made a lovely slide gesture and there it was...

So we have had pizza cooked on the stones, in the old system by an antique oven inside our home. We put on hand-made tomato sauce, organic flour for the “pizza pasta”…..capers fresh from the caper capital of the world….onions, the sweet onions of Pantelleria, anchovies from Sicilia and a very little fesh motzerella cheese….and stop (garlic on some, but not all)…we eat the fresh pizza and drink bear and while my friends speak in Italian I day dream of the perfect iron pot which would let me bake cornbread and southern biscuits in that oven.

The moon peaks in and out of the heavy clouds, there is a little rain. Today I saw so many flowers…in this season the island is a riot, an explosion of purples, red, whites and yellows. Now after the sun has set and the pizza has renewed us, it is time to smoke and talk……