The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is the name given to the deaths of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois, in the winter of 1929. May they rest in peace.
The St. Valentine’s Day Pizza Massacre happened in the winter of 2009 in my kitchen. What started out as a large, homemade, thin crust pepperoni pizza with black olives ended as a big, deep dish, pizza mess. Exact details are sketchy and eyewitness accounts unreliable. But here is what we know:
We made dough and let it rise in a bowl.
We rolled the dough out on a floured surface.
The dough was hand tossed.
Sauce was painstakingly applied.
Cheese was added.
Pepperoni and black olives were added.
This the point at which the massacre began. An attempt to “slip the peel under the pizza and lift it onto the pizza stone” was unsuccessful. The pizza folded like a paper fan in a Baptist church on a hot Sunday in August.
But, we were hungry. So we poured the whole mess into a deep dish pizza pan, baked it and ate it anyway. The sauce and toppings were on one side; the dough on the other. Emily declared it to be disgusting but Michael, Mandy and I liked it. We’re keeping the recipe a secret.