Lemonade Day: Cooking Up a Scary Meal - Pizza Roulette

Refreshing is: a cold glass of lemonade, sunshine after a heavy rain, a walk with the dog at dusk or in the early morning, making a scary dinner with the kids.

My new photography crew of Braedon Schmidt and Cassie Martinez came up with a scheme for dinner a-la-Halloween. It was scary indeed, and today I will share it with you.

ABOUT PREPARING FOOD

Before we continue, I will inform you that I'm a terrible cook. Burn is my middle name. What's that smell is not usually perfection but often leads to the blackened thing in the oven that is overdone. I'm no chef, and I'll be the first to tell you about it. Still, I will often make something edible when I'm preparing to go out to an experience about which I will write. I suppose that it's because eating is so much fun, and making something then eating it is even more fun. It doesn't always come out very well, as evidenced by the Scotch Pie I attempted to make before going to the Queen Mary's ScotsFest... Twice! The first time was less traditional than the second. And if I share that experience with you, I must share the video of the excellent Caber Toss that I took while I was there. I also learned about the steam bending of wood and found out more about steam bending at the bay area MakerFaire. But I'd better stop now, and get to the point of this post, else you'll have traveled years with me and - no pizza.

Sometimes I don't have enough time to make something in advance. So my photography team made sure to do it after our visit to the Queen Mary's Dark Harbor this year. I share with you today a very scary Pizza Roulette and tomorrow, Black Lemonade. Black Lemonade deserves its own day.

Pizza Roulette

We took the usual (easy) approach to making pizza at home and purchased ready-made pizza dough. We like the Trader Joe's pizza dough, found in the cold section. There are three types: regular white, wheat and herb. We purchased one of each. The dough goes well with the packaged cheese, Trader Giotto's Quattro Formaggio (a shredded blend of Parmesan, Asiago, Fontina && Mild Provolone Cheese).

We raided the fridge and identified over 35 items we could use as toppings. I could list them all, but I'll put up a photo instead. Let's just say they included peanut butter, Nathan's deli mustard, celery and nuts.

We used a random number generator app (sign of the times, people!) to generate the numbers of the items to be used. Because we had three bags of pizza dough, we designed three pizzas.

At this point, we became very nervous. It was scary, after all, considering eating pizzas with those particular combinations of ingredients on them. I must admit that we backed out of two of them and redesigned them.

Photos - all taken by me, Patricia Tsoi-A-Sue since the photography team was busy preparing the supper.

That's all for now, tomorrow I will share Black Lemonade.

ABOUT LEMONADE DAYS

In 2012, I decided I wanted to make 3 or more Makerspaces here in Long Beach. I set myself a task:100 days of creativity in search of projects, creatives, places, materials and equipment. I made a game and played it. Here in Long Beach, and here on the Belmont Shore Patch. It's been 5 long years and my mission is yet to be completed, but there is progress. And where there is progress, there is hope. The mission has adjusted and grown, and I've taken many paths. Some of those have turned out to be amazing, some less so. They are all learning opportunities. I learned that we all have super powers inside us, we just need to give them a chance to present themselves. Our powers all have levels and with practice those levels rise. I learned that everyone has a voice (some have many), and this forum, the Belmont Shore Patch, gave me one place to present one voice. A very special voice. One of community, of Long Beach. I learned about the internet, about video making, about blogging, about websites, about community building. If you'd like to check out the community we call Makersville, you can find it online here and at theLong Beach Sea Base on selected days and at selected times. We are working to find the solution to regular hours at the Maker Space at the Long Beach Sea Base.