Pizza and Male Mommies

Pizza is popular at our house.  Karen and I built a Pompeii brick oven three years ago and, as with our hot tub, we've proven wrong the naysayers who predicted "you'll get tired of it soon and never use it."  The only pizza lull of any length occurred December to February last winter when our patio was knee deep or more in snow, except for the neck-deep pile under the edge of our roof.

Guess what we had for dinner tonight.

Would you like to see inside?

Setting those bricks to form the dome was a project to remember.

The door is a removable piece of concrete made to fit in this opening.  See the hole above?  That's the bottom of the chimney, which is outside the doorway, a very important concept.  When we bake bread, we remove the fire and close the door, which keeps the heat inside for a long time.  When we bake pizza, we push the fire around the edge of the bottom of the dome and drop pizzas directly onto the hearth.  The oven is so hot, the pizzas are ready to eat in about 3 minutes.

"How's your garden?" Virginia asks, as if I had prompted her.

I did what I said I'd do in yesterday's blog.  I skipped my morning run and headed straight to the garden, where I pulled weeds, finished digging garlic, and planted green beans.  Here's the first bed.

The green beans are hiding under the lightly turned soil in the foreground, watered this evening after afternoon showers failed to show.  See those crepe myrtles?  Here's another view.

We called these "soybeans" when I was growing up.  Today, hoity toity, it's "edamame." Ed ain't my mommy.

Speaking of mommies, here's something I grow for two reasons: (1) they seem to repel squash bugs; and (2) my mother likes them.