PIZZA

,Ohh yes...if you are gonna get wild about beer, you better also mention our PIZZA, PIZZA, PIZZA craze....stretching back a mile...

Oddly enough, when I think of Pizza, I think of Lent, where us Catholics, had to give up meat on Fridays...cuz' our family was not a big fish-eating crowd...Maybe an ocaissonal Mrs Paul's Frozen Fish Sticks...that's about it...(to this day, I have yet to try lobster and probably never will)...

Why Pizza and Lent...???...

I must have ate a thousand John's Frozen Cheese Pizzas, when I was a young, hungry bugger...and I thought it was a sumptuous delight...And it was just a given, I'd be tossing some JOHN's into the oven....for 10 minutes...pre-heating...then another 10 minutes to cook it up...during Lent or any time a late night snack, was needed...

But as I grew older, I realized, those mini, 7 inch in diameter, pizzas, were downright icky, atrocious...The frozen crust...bland, hard-as-a-rock cardboard...with a smidgen of tainted sauce and tasteless cheese on top...Atrocious, doesn't do it justice...You couldn't get starving kids in Africa, to eat that stuff, these days...

And if you had any good sense, there was fresh pizza pie available, at a whole bunch of great pizza joints, all over the south-side...I definitely remember FALCO'S...(only a block and a half away on 87th Street...)

Absolutely dynamite, and my sisters had Falco's on speed dial, every Friday Night, they got stuck at home, baby-sitting me, with their boyfriend...We all munched away, endlessly, the gooey cheese., and mouth-watering crust...probably chugging down some Pepsi's...too...

For some strange reason, nobody finds a correlation between great pizza & the south-side, but I sure do...Deep Dish---Giordano's was down on 63rd...Thin Crust--at least a dozen truly awesome places come to mind...

Fox's...(100th & Western)
Falco's...(87th)
Dan's...(87th)
Crazy Sicilian...(87th)
Chucks...(102nd & Western)
Palermo's...(95th & Pulaski)
Rosario's...(95th)
Nick & Vito's...(84th & Pulaski)
Waldo Cooney's...(double-decker pizza, 79th)
Sailor's Pub...(79th)
Tu Kynds...(103rd)
Home Run Inn...(35th/west Comiskey Park area, or frozen, any grocery/supermarket)

That's 12...just off the top of my head....Oh yeah, there is definitely more...

The pizza of the South-Side really was one of the topics, of endless debate...We'd call each other crazy fools, for liking one pizza joint over another...In reality, they all were quite good, usually an old family recipe, nobody in their right mind, would ever venture, to invent...

And surely, the pizza craze stemmed over into the pizzas you could make yourself...pizza kits.

You'd save a ton of dough & get a fresh crust, a container of sauce and a bag of mozzarella cheese....It wasn't fancy, but it gave you a chance to add different things like oregano and Italian sausage, pepperoni...It was a supreme challenge we felt that our home-made batch would turn out amazingly good...(but they really did suck...)...Undoubtedly, our pizza senses were rather erratic...but our fascination and love of pizza only grew stronger and stronger...as the years rolled on...

From the crude crew that devoured cold pizza, leftover in the refrigerator, the next morning or the crazy kids that endlessly dreamed of owning their own thriving pizza parlors, someday...There is something amazingly special and rare, inside tose pies...an essence of Americana, thru & thru.

Pizza...such a yummy snack, a complete dinner attack, a fun food for all, having such a ball...that weekly, fun family ritual, getting us running to the table, and digging deep, and hard, into our very fabric of life...hidden inside every delectable slice...

I don't know about you...but I'm getting pretty hungry...and with PIZZA almost available in almost every conceivable dimension...today...It's PIZZA TIME in nothing flat...

Sure, the luster has lost a bit of its glow....yet when see that hot, round pie, all cheesy and bubbly, a sweet-sweet, warm scent of sauce...floating all about...it's almost impossible not to want to grab a piece of pie, right then and there...thrusting it into your mouth, even though it would scaldingly scorch your tongue...to pieces, from that intense heat...

Love it or leave it....no way...simply gotta have it....no matter where you are...good old delicious Pizza...everywhere & anywhere, and truly cooking down on the South-Side, long, long ago...