The Tom Tom Club

I've spent my life eating. When I am not eating, I am thinking about what and when I will be eating next. There is no middle-ground, and this is the truth. Summer is my favorite season because there is the shortest distance between thinking about the food that I want and obtaining it; it seems that every other corner I turn offers up a bouquet of fresh vegetables and thick, dark breads for sale . It's the season of the farmers market... and all my favorite foods are there, begging to be eaten raw, ripe, and juicy.

I say this because I want you to be sympathetic to my plight, the one in which I have begun to eat too many tomatoes. I ingest them constantly and without regard to personal pride or recipe. On many a workday I have been known to casually saunter into the Union Square greenmarket, spend an hour or so fervently selecting the ripest and reddest of all the tomatoes--the ones whose splitting flesh yields softly to the applied pressure of my palm--and then return, triumphant with my prizes, to the office to eat them completely raw (and a little noisily, if my coworkers don't say so themselves). It's disgusting, childish, frivolous. These things I know, but I am powerless to stop it.







The only thing to be done (the only thing that could conceal the nature of the beast) was to find recipes that allowed me to consume as many delicious tomatoes as my gourd could possibly hope to handle in as respectable a fashion as possible. Respectable being the key word here, but one also having a broad and highly elastic definition.

Since pizza in the summertime is an all time favorite of mine, I thought I might as well up and toss 'em on some 'za. This is one of those recipes that I can hardly wait to make again, both because it was so delicious and also because there about a million things I want to tweak about in order to make it better. Any suggestions are warmly accepted and appreciated!

Thus: Lemon-Avocado and Tomato Pizza

You Will Need:
1 tomato, ripe
1 avocado, ripe
a few slices of Fontina (or your favorite) kind of cheese
1 bunch fresh basil
pizza dough (i picked up a big bucket of mine from my favorite pizza place)
2-3 tbls. of olive oil
2-3 tbls. of fresh lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

To Make:

Pre-heat your over to 350°. Slice the avocado open, then use a butter knife to slice it while it remains in the shell. Each slice should be relatively narrow, but not so much as to disintegrate into mush upon removal from the shell; they should have some individual integrity. Scoop out the slices using a spoon, and place them in a bowl. Cover them heartily in lemon juice and black pepper, then set them aside (they'll come in handy later.)

Next, prepare the dough by abusing it a little. You'll have to roll and beat it on a well floured surface. Using a rolling pin works best, but I found that a sturdy glass can suffice just fine in the absence of one. Once the dough is nice and pliable, stretch and roll it out as thinly as possible, and mold it into as round a shape as you can manage. Rub the finished piece with fresh olive oil. Now you're ready to start laying down the actual pizza.

Slice the tomato thinly, clean and chop a little basil, slice a little of the cheese. Lay down the tomato slices, making sure to leave a little space between each round. Now, arrange the slices of lemon-soaked avocado to fill in any blank spaces. Sprinkle generously with the fresh basil. Tear your cheese slices into bits, and scatter them across everything. Eventually, they will melt into brown, attractive little spots.

Pop your pizza into the oven and let it bake until the cheese bubbles and the crust smolders into a lovely, golden shade of tan. Let cool and then eat it all in one sitting!




For the sake of historical record, I must also note that this recipe was made and consumed in honor of my close, personal friend Ben's birthday. He is the man, obviously:

Summer's First Sound!

The first time I ever came to New York, my friend Julia and I survived exclusively on two dollar slices of cheese pizza selected at random from various sidewalk cafes. It was the dead of winter, fresh snow shivering in the still air, and I remember being particularly grateful for each still-steaming, gratuitously layered slice of genuine Big Apple 'za. I was then unacquainted with East Coast weather beyond the novelty of a Christmas spent in Ohio with my extended family, and I thought that pizza must be the pinnacle of all NYC cold-weather-food staples. Short of heavy drinking, it was second to none in terms of combining comfort and satisfaction with warmth.

I certainly wasn't giving summer a second thought at the time, let alone the idea that I might be a bona-fide resident of NYC by the time the season rolled through again, so I was pleasantly surprised by my recent discovery that pizza transcends seasonal parameters and is actually the perfect food all year round. It was a revelation sparked first by a decadent pie-on-the-promenade in Brooklyn Heights (see above), and then fully solidified by a hasty grease-fest on the LIRR coming home from Long Beach yesterday afternoon. After gorging at the latter, we all laid back, hands comfortably resting on newly-inflated belly's, to satisfactorily contemplate the greenery idling by our windows.

If I thought that pizza was good when it was cold out, it was only because I was utterly clueless to the delight of pizza when it is quite literally BOILING out. As far as slices go, I'll admit that the Long Island wedge was a simpleton...bubbly cheese crested with grease and ringed with a slim, attractively golden crust, but of a quality smartly bolstered by its consumption on such a perfectly hot summer day. It became the perfect accessory to my already overblown sense of adolescence. (A sense wrought upon me by the coming of every June, let me remind you, an academic hangover of sorts from my still habitual expectation of summer vacation.) It's just so easy to pretend I'm still a kid on a summer day when I'm toting around a massive hunk of dripping, cheesy pizza. Sigh! If only Miss Julia could see me now...