It's Tuesday, so I'm joining Debbie at "A Quilter's Table" for Tuesday at the Table. She has a great post about the salt she uses in her kitchen. I'm no salt aficionado, but her post reminded me of a fun salt story that's deep in my past! It goes way back to my elementary school days. I grew up in Baton Rouge Louisiana (born in Baton Rouge General Hospital), and lived there until I was in high school (Baton Rouge High School). I attended public school there. One rite of passage of all Baton Rouge school kids was a field trip to Avery Island, Louisiana. This is a special place. It's where Tabasco hot sauce was created, and is still made, it's a rich wildlife refuge and sanctuary, and it's also the first salt rock mine in North America. The whole area is a huge, almost pure salt dome that still produces salt. When I was a kid, you could take tours of the salt mines, and I remember being underground, taking huge slides down to the floor, and standing in an enormous "room", bigger than any sports arena that was all salt! AMAZING! They've long ago stopped giving tours there, but you can still take tours of the Tabasco sauce plant, and nature preserve.
My "foodie" post is all about home made pizza. I was not at all a pizza aficionado until I met my husband, over 20 years ago. Louisiana is a great food mecca, but is not especially known for good pizza. My husband, though, grew up in Chicago, eating the incredible Chicago deep dish pizza. Living in the small towns that we have, we've been constantly striving to perfect home made pizza. I've long ago given up making deep dish pizza, but do make all of our dough from scratch. I'm down to our last 2 jars of home grown, home made tomato pizza sauce too. I like to saute onions and garlic (home grown when we got them) to put on the pizza, and we recently discovered healthier turkey pepperoni. We use less cheese and at home, I can customize the pizza for the 4 different tastes quite easily!
My favorite kind is Barbecue Chicken pizza with red onions, parsley and pineapple. :) Hardly traditional. Next would be pepperoni, sausage and pineapple, light on the sauce. To me, pineapple makes pizza more edible.
ReplyDeleteI worked in a mom and pop pizza place in High school so my kids think I am an expert. LOL!! Not even close. We had our dough made fresh from a local bakery and just about everything else was canned. Onions and peppers were the only fresh things in sight. I could assemble a pizza like the wind though!
I grew up in Utah, home of the Great Salt Lake, and Salt Flats. I have probably eaten the salt from there but not on purpose. My husband once bought me some gourmet caramels with sea salt on top. WOW! Now I LOVE to buy caramels dipped in chocolate and add a couple of grains of sea salt. Milky Way Simply Carmel bars do in a pinch, but I do prefer a gourmet chocolate. Incidentally, I worked in a gourmet chocolate store also, but that was before sea salt came into vogue.
Fun salt story, Becky! And love that you make your own pizza. We have before but not regularly. We have a favorite pizza place tho - it means comfort food to us. But my fav pizza ever? In Volterra Italy of course. Thanks so much for sharing AND for linking up! ;-)
ReplyDeleteMy favourite pizza? Better to ask what pizza I *don't* like, the answer to which is "anything featuring goat cheese." We make our own dough, too -- not at all difficult and altogether yummy. And now I'm hungry. Darn it.
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