Last night was a thoroughly enjoyable evening! Dr. Dan Wood, a very good dentist from Menomonie, Wisconsin, had me in to make pizzas and entertain his staff for the annual Christmas party this year.
What a spread!
It started with jumbo shrimp and cocktail sauce, smoked salmon of several different varieties and a host of cheese balls and God knows what else, accompanied by some Johnny Lammer selected wines.
This kept the guests busy while I was preparing the dough and ingredients for pizza. Here's how hospitable and considerate Dr. Dan is: He made certain there was plenty of cold Leinenkugel's beer on hand for the pizza cook and slipped me some of the great Alaskan shrimp aand cocktail sauce.
He and I both marveled at the Alaskan shrimp. Who knew that there is such a thing as Alaskan shrimp???
Every time I make pizza at someone's home, it is always a bit of an adventure because of the differences in stoves. the Wood's have a convection oven cppled with a regular oven, so I had some trouble regulating my heat output at first.
About half way through the process of producing 9 12 inch pizzas, I hit my stride. I don't mean to brag, but the guests really enjoyed the pizzas and ate until they could eat no more!
I always go from sinple to complex: the first pizzas were fresh tomato, fresh basil, cheese. the next was fresh mushroom, cooked down with some olive oil and sea salt and then generously blanketed with mozarella, the next was home mde Italian sausage with green pepper and onion, then pepperoni, then pepperoni and onion, then sausage, pepperoni, and jalepeno-stuffed green olive for the finale.
A good time was had by all! Merry Christmas to Dr Dan Wood and staff! And many thanks for the pportunity to be a part of it!
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My friend Tom Wieseler nd son Gabe just stopped by with a wonderful Christmas bag of goodies for Kim and me. Chocolates, macadamia nuts, sandal wood soap bars, Ghirardelli Chocolate-flavored coffees, a limoncello liqueur cake, salted corn nuts, --on and on!
He also told me of "gag" gift boxes that you can put real Christmas gifts into but because of the printing on the boxes, are totally misleading. We all had a good laugh over the box that reads:
REMOTE CONTROL SMOKE DETECTOR -- COMLETE WITH SNOOZE BUTTON.
GOTTA GO NOW --GOT A BIG GIG IN TILDEN!
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