Kevin [NOTE: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may get a small commission if you click it or decide to make a purchase. However, you’re in luck, as this comes at no additional cost to you. As always, many thanks in advance for supporting the brands that keep the lights on here!]
If you’ve been here for a hot minute or two, you’ll see that we’re all about wacky and offbeat holidays and observances. Today’s post is one of them, and it’s National Pizza Day 2022. If you’ve seen my Instagram, you’ll see that I’ve posted about it there, showing off the latest batch of Lunch Lady Pizza I made.
Pizza was a huge part of my life as a kid, since my mom worked a lot, and it was just us. I can count on one hand the number of times we had a turkey during the holiday season, both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Instead of turkey, we’d either hit up the store for some frozen pizzas, or we’d call whatever pizza delivery place that was still open and would actually deliver to our neighborhood. Most of them wouldn’t deliver to our neighborhood, even though we lived in their delivery range.
It would be Thanksgiving pizza, and Christmas pizza for us instead. My mom lived for Domino’s, and in the years that passed up until her illness and the pandemic forced her into retirement, after which she went on the downward spiral, it would be Domino’s every week.
As for me, I got tired of Domino’s, and officially bowed out of it the year I graduated college. Instead, I’d have something whipped up in the microwave.
The week my mom died, I had plans to make some pizza dip, both that week, and for Thanksgiving, since her dentures were unwearable at that point. It was this recipe, which had been on repeat for me well before I lost the weight this time around, and I hadn’t had a chance to go to the store to get the cream cheese. I had everything else in the house.
I also had plans to make this Domino’s-style pizza sauce to go with that dip, for old time’s sake.
Then, IT happened, and IT happened to my plans too.
In order to keep with tradition, I found the Lunch Lady Pizza recipe, and made my first batch on Thanksgiving 2021. I only had the turkey pepperoni, and since King Arthur Flour’s GF flour specifically tells us not to use yeast with it, I left the yeast out, and since this stuff acts similarly to whole wheat flour, I added a bit more water than what it originally called for.
The original recipe calls for a large cookie sheet and I picked up this set from Wally World before I got started making it. BTW, carrying that home on the bus sucked donkey balls, since it’s so big, haha.
I was so sad that my mom wasn’t here to have this, and even more so knowing it never had to play out the way it all did.
Christmas 2021 was absolute garbage for me, same as the rest of that whole rotten, worthless year. I won’t get into how bad it got for me, since that’s a story for another time, but I made more Lunch Lady Pizza, with turkey pepperoni. This was enough for about a week and a half’s worth of dinners, since I cut the pieces a bit smaller than I did with my first one.
Below is my latest batch of Lunch Lady Pizza, this one using Wally World’s house-brand GF flour, with the yeast the original recipe called for. This dough also needed more water than what the original recipe called for. I found a can of spaghetti sauce, opened it, and saw it was way too thin. So I found another one, and opened it. That one had the consistency I was looking for, so I used it for the pizza.
This time, I had some white cheddar that needed to be used up ASAP, mozzarella, olives, serrano peppers, jalapenos, and turkey pepperoni.
It was what I used to make in the pizza dips I’d have while I was losing the weight, before everything turned into hardcore dog shyt.
The whole house smelled of pizza, complete with the heat from the peppers I used this time around. As soon as it was done, I took it out, and let it cool on top of the stove before I cut it into those famous squares a lot of us remember from elementary school.
As far as that other can of spaghetti sauce, you know, the one that ended up being way too thin for pizza. Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t make the best pasta sauce going either. It lives on in another use: the basis for some minestrone soup with some Banza rotini that I had knocking around in the pantry for way too long. I’ll be posting about that on Instagram soon, so stick around and stay tuned. I’ll drop the recipe in a future post, if anyone’s interested in that, btw.
Over to you, readers. Are you celebrating National Pizza Day? If so, will it be something homemade or bought? Either way, I’d love to hear all about it, as well as your thoughts and takeaways. Drop it all like it’s hot below, and let’s talk.
