Giuseppe’s Pizza and Chocolate Ganache Cake
Aw, I’m all verklempt. I’m so glad to have you guys here, cheering me on, balancing things out, telling me what I need to hear when I can’t see past my thighs. (Especially my right one, which is inexplicably two inches bigger than my left one.) It’s silly, isn’t it? The hungry part of my brain easily convinces the part that controls my hands and mouth that life is too short to worry about aesthetics, that I shouldn’t waste my time caring about my hair or what I can or can’t wear and who might see me, but rather seize the day (and the donut) and appreciate what I have. Which is all true. Especially when news comes of the death of someone close to many friends and colleagues, and another old friend is suddenly admitted to the ICU. What better salve than a comforting meal shared with people you love? To obsess about that extra piece of buttered toast with tea before bed seems trite. Lucky me to have such worries as a job as a food writer and too much bakery bread with strawberry-balsamic jam.
I want to do it up right, to live unreservedly, deliberately and without regret, not because life is short, which too often it is, but because I can. I sometimes look at life as if it were one of those little plexiglass booths they have at car shows – the ones a person can win a minute to climb inside of and grab as many fluttering dollar bills as they can. If you won a minute you wouldn’t just stand there, would you? If you had that opportunity to reach out and try to catch as many experiences as possible in the time you had? Would you care who was watching? (I suppose I would, what with all that jumping and bending over and plexiglass.) And what do weight and self-consciousness have to do with it, except perhaps make it more difficult to maneuver in that little booth?
Ah, the bottle of Red Rooster Cab Merlot from the Naramata Bench is doing its thing. You can tell when I start speaking in bad metaphors. I’m telling you, if you had half a bottle of red on board this would all make perfect sense.
So I ate out twice today. We’ll call it research-slash-therapy. It’s far easier to carry out a new years’ resolution to spend more time with friends than to eat food, not too much – mostly plants. And it’s sometimes difficult to follow through with both when socializing so often involves chatting at a table laden with yummy stuff.
This morning was spontaneous lattes and morning glory muffins (they do all their baking from scratch now) at Caffe Rosso, and then after a meeting at the Epcor Centre I popped over to Giuseppe’s Italian Market on 1st St, beside the Drum & Monkey, for pizza.
One Margarita and one Giuseppe’s (spicy pancetta, purple onions and sundried tomatoes specked with red pepper flakes) made from the rolling out of chewy dough to blasting in the wood-fired oven while we wandered the store and ogled giant meatballs, cheeses, homemade sauces, sausages and pastas.
The slab of cake-shaped chocolate ganache wasn’t our fault. The manager showed up at our table with it, having overheard the guy who made our pizza raving about how good it was. And it really was; like a big triangular Icy Square on a thin layer of sponge cake that really served only to keep the giant truffle from sticking to the plate.
After a full two days without chocolate, it went down all too easily. I had help, but not much; she left me to finish the second half myself and I didn’t even argue.
January 09 2010 | eating out | 82 Comments »
