O is for Oven Pizza
I don’t have an oven. Well, I don’t have a proper oven. I have what is called a mini-four, which sits above the fridge, meaning that I need to stand on a stall each time I wish to reach it. It is not very practical and as is evident in its name, it is mini. You cannot fit a full-size pizza in the oven, you must cut it in half before cooking, which isn’t easy if the pizza of choice is a frozen Ristorante.
Oven pizza is one of my greatest culinary joys, I think that it has a horrible reputation which is very much undeserved. It rings a level of nostalgia with each cheesy bite and evokes a memory of sitting on sticky village hall floors at preadolescent birthday parties.
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this veneration of frozen food as I now call cooking my full-time job but sometimes it gives you exactly what you need. Much like oven pizza, cooking or cheffing as profession has a reputation of being hard and tough and late night. In the traditionally masculine industry this reputation has remained steadfast for as long as we have been buying food that we didn’t make ourselves. But why does this reputation of 80 hour weeks and deathly night shifts still prevail? I have been thinking a lot about this over the past week as I decide down which culinary path I’d like to venture and truthfully as I am typing this, I still don’t really know. Perhaps the catharsis of writing this newsletter will push me closer towards a decision but perhaps it won’t and I’ll have to take a tentative leap in one certain direction and hope for the best.
Making decisions that affect your future is sadly an indubitable part of being human and being (nearly) 25 and I’m not sure that I enjoy it that much. Having had the opportunity to continue in education until the age of 24 has allowed me not to have to make too many of these decisions and it has been a relatively smooth course. It is why I like oven pizzas, it is a thoughtless food. Except for the freaky French who leave the stones in the olives on their ready-made pizzas, it is reasonably fuss-free food to make and to eat. When I google “thoughtless synonyms” in order to continue with this metaphor, there are all negative, giving inconsiderate, neglectful, heedless, rash. But does the opposite of thinking have to be unthinking? I feel that there is a happy medium between the two, the middle ground in which we can pause and ponder, surmise and suppose. If the opposite of McDo is noma, then what do the rest of us eat? Normalcy.
Ease doesn’t equate to laziness. The hard graft, ball-busting, teeth-cutting, backbreaking approach to work to me feels passé. Maybe this will read as lazy, I’d be interested to know. There is a new buzzword flying around at the moment which describes a backlash to being overworked and it is called “quiet quitting”.
Quiet Quitting: The practice of a softer approach to work, usually portrayed by not staying past your agreed upon hours, not answering work emails on the weekend, not accepting additional workloads without additional pay.
The WSJ has called it a GenZ phenomenon, which I would normally loathe to subscribe to but this one has legs. Is it revolutionary to think that we should do the job that we signed up to do rather than overstretching ourselves to the point of buzzword number two, “burnout”? It is expected in nearly all professions to work to this level of exhaustion and be recompensed by promotion, adulation or just a pat on the back but if we continue in this vein, what will we have to do to be rewarded even more?
The easy things in life are sometimes the most joyful. Easy food - crisp sandwiches, beans on toast, tomato pasta, cold chocolate, orange juice straight from the carton, warm crumpets and cold butter.
Oven pizza is happy in its simplicity, it doesn’t oversell itself and it doesn’t ask for too much in return. Oven pizza is artisanal pizza that has quit quietly and , in my humble opinion, it still gets the job done.
Brilliant Tori.
Brilliant, darling girl. I love it xxx