Posts Tagged ‘pizza’
Pizzas Gina
It was with heavy hearts that Cyndie and I recently learned one of our most revered pizza restaurants back in Eden Prairie, Gina Maria’s Pizza, had abruptly gone out of business, closing all four of its locations. It felt like another indicator of our aging was being manifest before our eyes.
“Remember the good old days when we were able to buy pizzas from Gina’s?”
Back when I was working in Plymouth, MN, I would order a half-baked version of our favorites and bring them home whenever it was my turn to cook dinner.
When Cyndie would come home to visit the year she worked in Boston, MA, she would order a pizza while still at the airport and pick it up on the way, carrying a fresh deep dish in the door when she arrived.
Well, to our great relief, news got out that a manager from two of the locations had acquired the recipes with the blessing of the former owners and arranged to reopen the Eden Prairie location under the new name “Pizzas Gina,” which I think is brilliant.
I happened to be in EP yesterday to attend the funeral of the mother of one of my high school classmates, and the church was just down the road from our cherished pizza place. From the parking lot of the church, I ordered a rendition that, back in the day, Cyndie would have been able to speed dial her phone and ask for “the usual.”
With 30 minutes to kill, I took a slow drive to the cul-de-sac location of the house I lived in during my middle school and high school years. I almost remembered the family names for each of the houses along Cedar Ridge Road. It’s been over 45 years since I lived there, but plenty of the same trees I used to mow around were still in the yard of our old house.
Dinner last night was as delicious as ever. Maybe even more so, after a period of thinking we would never be able to taste our old favorite again. We are so grateful that the previous owners supported the new family’s efforts to keep the recipe alive and reopen the restaurant under a slightly different name.
If you ever find yourself in Eden Prairie and are a fan of pizza with an incredibly rich tomato sauce, make a point of ordering from the new Pizzas Gina on Mitchell Road.
As our typical (early) bedtime approached last night, Cyndie’s phone received multiple alerts from an app monitoring the intensity of the aurora in our location, so we took Asher out for a late walk to check it out. At the high point of our driveway, we lay down to ease the strain on our necks while staring at the sky.
We expected to see the radiating colors to the north, but we found that the display was happening straight up over our heads and stretched across the sky from west to east.
Some lingering clouds infringed on our viewing a little bit, yet they also occasionally added some interesting drama to the spectacle. We experienced an impressive combination of reds and greens. The show we enjoyed rivaled some of the nights when we were in Iceland last year.
I also spotted a shooting star/meteor streak, adding to my wonder and awe.
It all seemed a fitting compliment to our special treat of a favorite pizza dinner. Pretty much out of this world!
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Early Start
Like a couple of young newlyweds, Cyndie and I got an early start to the holiday weekend and hustled north to the lake by ourselves a day before the massive crowds that will follow. A stop at Coop’s Pizza for our favorite choice in Hayward, then some authentic ice cream decadence at West’s Dairy for dessert, and we were in full lake-place weekend mode before ever reaching the “cabin.”
For the record, I splurged with one scoop each of Coconut Magic Bar and Chunky Musky.
There was some reminiscing about dining at Coop’s on our honeymoon almost 40-years ago, back when it was located in a former gas station on Highway 63. Cyndie burned her lip so bad when hot cheese pulled off the crust that she blistered.
After we unloaded the car, we topped off our night with access to satellite television Tour de France coverage rerunning the stage of day 6 and another Mark Cavendish sprint to the stage victory. We were happy as clams.
It has been longer than I can recall that we have been up at the lake two weekends in a row. This could get to be a habit. Thank goodness we have found a willing animal sitter in Anna, a student at UW River Falls.
It feels particularly summery, which is just as it should now that we are into July. Obviously, we don’t live in the southern hemisphere.
Watching the professional cyclists racing after having just spent some extended time on my bike tour along the Mississippi River in Minnesota provides a valuable perspective. Their accomplishments are so much more amazing than they make them appear.
I hope they get to have ice cream at the end of their daily races.
I visited a couple of Dairy Queens after my days of biking.
It was an early start to foiling my goals of eating less sugar than my addiction longs for. I can attest that doing so wreaks havoc on my attempts to control the brain’s tendency to crave sweetness full time.
Good thing my healthy routine will be able to resume as soon as this weekend is over. My summer brain is starting to think I should have ice cream every day.
I’m afraid the rest of my body takes exception to that kind of thinking.
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Guilty Pleasures
A portrait of my perfectly unsophisticated after-work lethargy that a more sane person might not choose to feature for all the world to view:
Pizza dinner in bed with Pequenita while I enjoy our favorite guilty pleasure rerun television series, “The Closer” with Kyra Sedgwick as Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson of the Priority Homicide Division, LAPD.
Even though we have probably already seen all of the 109 episodes of the 7 seasons that first aired between 2005 and 2012, we usually can’t remember what’s going to happen when seeing them again on one of the local broadcast sub-channels our antenna picks up.
It’s probably not all that different from the many times I watched reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” after school as a kid. There was never going to be anything new to gain out of the shows, but that never seemed to matter. I think it has something to do with the ensemble of characters the actors portray. They become as familiar as friends, and it is comforting to hang out with them.
Add in our favorite thick crust Gina Maria’s pizza that Cyndie surprised me with for dinner and I was in couch-potato –well, more accurately: “bed-potato”– heaven. An exercise in low-cost, lowbrow entertainment.
I even used the side of my fork to cut embarrassingly large bites of the pizza, instead of my knife. Oh, the horror.
What can I say? It was Halloween. I was being spooky.
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High Points
After work yesterday, Cyndie and I hopped in her car and drove up to the lake for the weekend. Leaving on a Thursday night makes for easy driving, in the absence of the typical weekend traffic headed north. Our route took us through some of the damage from last week’s storms that produced near-hurricane force winds and some baseball-sized hail.
It was fruitless to try to capture a representative photo of the large scope of broken trees for miles, but I snapped a few shots on my cell phone through the car window at highway speed.
It was a little easier to capture a sample of some building damage that hadn’t been covered up yet.
The extensive damage to trees was a really sad sight. It gave me a whole new perspective on the comparatively minor issues we are facing at home with a few dead or dying trees leaning across our trails. We’ve got it easy.
High point of the day for me yesterday was finding a neighboring farmer working our fields to finally bale some of the cut hay that has been left on the ground for weeks, repeatedly being rained on instead of properly drying out. The past week offered the longest stretch of dry days that I can recall so far this summer.
The second high point was getting a chance to watch portions of Stage 18 of the Tour de France on the subscription TV channels when we got here. At home, we only pick up what is publicly available through the airwaves, and bike racing coverage is minimal.
Two big mountain stages remain, today and tomorrow, and I am thrilled to be able to view all the drama as it happens.
Maybe it will be rainy here as the morning progresses so I don’t waste sunny lake time sitting indoors in front of the glowing screen getting my bike racing fix.
Honorable mention high point yesterday goes to the Coop’s pizza dinner we devoured when we got to Hayward. Oh, so delicious.
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Kitchen Aromas
Honestly, I don’t feel worthy of the aromas that greeted me from Cyndie’s kitchen when I walked in the door after work yesterday. She pulled me all the way into some of my fondest November memories with a robust batch of fresh Chex mix roasting in the oven.
Threw me back to Thanksgiving day parades, afternoon football games, and my dear ol’ mom.
I don’t know which came first. Did my love of cereal lead to an overwhelming attachment to Chex mix, or did my fondness for Chex mix lead to my mind-boggling passion for cereal?
No sooner does the mix come out of the oven and Cyndie puts in a pizza crust to pre-bake.
Not one to avoid a challenge, she was working her magic on an untested recipe for an adventurous fresh cranberry balsamic white pizza.
I can sincerely say that this did not bring back a single memory or aroma from my past. I can take, or leave, an arugula salad on my pizza, but ricotta cheese in place of a good salty tomato sauce left this experiment lacking.
It looked tantalizing, though.
Just needed more sauce and maybe a heaping crown of mozzarella cheese for my tastes. And bacon.
What?
That was Cyndie’s idea. We read somewhere that the most common ingredient in contest-winning recipes happens to be bacon flavor in some shape or form.
We both got a chuckle out of that.
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Food Love
Thirty-seven years ago this morning, Cyndie and I woke up in a cute little cabin by the Cascade River on the north shore of Lake Superior. It was the first day of our week-long honeymoon that would ultimately include some camping, and then visits to one of the old Wildwood cabins in Hayward and a night at Telemark Lodge near Cable.
One of the memories we laugh about is a breakfast we enjoyed at a restaurant where everything was perceived as exceptionally perfect. The best eggs ever, the toast was out of this world, the service, the lighting… I believe we were in such a state of newlywed bliss that we were filtering every single experience through a lens overflowing with love.
Or, we just really love food.
Last night I brought home Cyndie’s favorite pizza for dinner. She arrived with a package of coconut infused dark chocolate covered almonds for me.
I gotta say, they tasted pretty close to similarly exceptional as that brilliant breakfast we enjoyed 37 years ago.
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Natural Oscillation
There are days, and even just moments within days, when it feels like the world surrounding me is flowing away from my presence. Then there are probably an equal number of occasions when the sensation comes across more like everything is blowing toward me.
Well, duh. Ebb and flow. Of course it would feel that way. The thing is, I have to pay enough attention to perceive that oscillation. It might seem obvious, but it is also, for the most part, invisible. That is, unless you take into account the marvels of the universe that are all riding along on the same waves.
Our animals, the weather, the innumerable growing things everywhere around us, they are all dictating and reacting to the energy that pulsates and resonates through our beings.
We recently watched a documentary about water, and it pointed out how much connection there is throughout the world, simply through water. Our bodies are mostly water. If you and I drank from the same pool, we would have the same water within us. It would be the same water being consumed by the plants and animals in and around that same pool.
The same water that has been cycling from sea, to sky, to earth for as long as we can imagine.
It’s no wonder the pull of the moon and the reacting tides make such a common impression on people. It’s affecting the same water in all of us.
Or, something like that.
For some reason, my craving for pizza tends to arrive with a mystical regularity that exceeds most natural frequencies. I benefit from not being very picky about types and styles, and am blessed that Cyndie is almost as adventurous as me, so frequency comes with variety.
Last night, she baked a homemade pizza on the grill.
All I can say about that is, “MmmMmmmm.”
That’s a comment I tend to make around here at mealtimes with an unsurprising regularity. It’s my natural pizza oscillation.
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Pizza Magic
I live with her every day, but Cyndie continues to amaze me with her gifts of getting things to happen. Last night she listed off a couple of dinner menu options that failed to inspire me. Reading my hesitation, she started tossing out other ideas.
“Pizza!”
She said the magic word. That choice resonated for me. I had actually noticed a craving earlier in the day for her homemade pizza, but didn’t want to trouble her with it. Obviously, she sensed it anyway and dug the option out of her bag of tricks.
She channeled George with her masterful crafting of the dough for the crust. I reminded her that I saw George put his crust in to partially bake before adding toppings. As I helped to grate a large block of mozzarella cheese for her, my fingers got cold.
Cyndie mentioned it had come out of the freezer, as had the pre-baked sausage she was using. Even though she had not planned to make a pizza for dinner, she didn’t hesitate to react to my craving and rustle up the best of ingredients in our kitchen, both fresh and frozen.
She knocked this one out of the park!
Even with a sauce she admitted was a compromise settled on by necessity, this custom pizza pie was fantastic. I fear how much better it might have turned out had she been given proper time to plan in advance.
I witnessed some real pizza magic last night, I tell you.
Pizza magic.
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Improving Outlook
It is said that one way to a person’s heart is through their stomach. I won’t deny being an easily satisfied eater. Ply me with delectable delights and I will instantly offer my allegiance. Cyndie and George hatched a plan to assuage my recent exhaustion and woe with a promise of homemade pizza and some massage.
Who wouldn’t begin to feel more hopeful at offerings like that?
I decided to take some of my own advice, choosing to turn off the sad news flowing constantly out of my car radio and replacing it with my personal library of long-cherished music for the drive home from the day-job yesterday. It was bad enough that I had to commute to the day-job on my usual extra day on the ranch. I didn’t need the added downer of endless news-feed distress.
I stepped in the door from walking the dog and tending to the horses to find George’s smiling face in the kitchen. He was working dough and creating scrumptious food art that looked as good as it smelled. And trust me, it ultimately tasted even better than it’s aroma implied.
As if that wasn’t enough to loosen my strings, Cyndie had a fire glowing in the fireplace and offered up the opportunity to have my stress headache massaged away.
Yeah, those knotted muscles in my back and shoulders were real. Real crunchy.
Right up until they weren’t.
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And as quickly as that, the ache in my head wasn’t so noticeable, either. Now that’s my kind of medication for what ails you. Turn off the news, put on good music, get massaged, and eat a special meal prepared by hand with loving care. No pills or alcohol required.
I’m feeling some hope that these steps of intervention have me well placed to carry on a search for that hope I lost somewhere along the way in November.
Cyndie is gaining strength and ability every day in her journey of healing and rehabilitation, post knee replacement surgery. I am beginning to believe once again that she will someday be able to help care for the horses and walk Delilah, which would lighten my load considerably at a time when the demands of the day-job appear to be intensifying significantly.
If I am unable to find hope in anything else at this time, I am at the very least relieved to have found hope in this improving outlook.
Here’s to the prospect of a lighter load.
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Relative Something 