I’ve always felt a little disconnected from my family heritage. Growing up all of my close friends came from first or second generation american families: Italian, Greek, Russian, Jamaican, you name it, they lived it. Being an only child and not really having a sense of ancestry I felt like I missed out on something. My mom’s family is Greek and Irish, but we’re not close with them. My dad’s family is English and Scottish, but we’ve been in the United States essentially since the mayflower. My mom and I were really interested to see what region of Greece her family is from and I did my Ancestry DNA to see if it could give us more information. It can’t differentiate between your dads side and your moms but we know a decent amount about my dad’s family so we figured the unknowns would mostly be mom’s side. We expected to see a lot of Irish and some Greek. What was super shocking was that my DNA popped up as almost 40% Germanic Europe. Upon further digging into birth, marriage, immigration records on ancestry I located all four of my mom’s grandparents. Turns out her dad’s parents were from Kalabaka, Greece and some Macedonian Greek city that no longer exists. On her mom’s side, her grandparents were Polish, and Irish specifically from Galway. The Greek and Polish ancestry doesn’t have too much information past grandparents but the Irish side dates back to the 1600’s in Galway which is pretty cool, especially since we are going to Galway for Christmas. All of this new family information and I still just want to eat pizza. I should have been Italian.
Pizza is super easy but for some reason I find it to be one of those things thats really tedious because you can only fit so many pizzas in the oven at a time. I usually do a pesto lately i’ve been topping my pesto pizza with artichoke hearts, mozzarella, red onion, pine nuts and then fresh arugula once it comes out of the oven. I also did a roasted garlic and mushroom, and used the roasted garlic as a sauce base for the mozzarella, ricotta, and mushrooms. Typically I will do a classic margherita, and then some kind of simple prosciutto, or salami pizza with red sauce. I roll my dough out really really paper thin so it has a nice crunch. Make sure you line your baking sheet with parchment and generously sprinkle corn meal so that the pizza’s don’t stick to the pan. I get my dough from the bakery counter at the grocery store usually. Rouses sell’s raw baguette dough, you just have to get it in the morning or the day before to let it rise sufficiently. Cook the pizza’s at 400F for about 20 minutes and voila!
