Let them(us) eat pizza pies

How the Martha Stewart documentary made me brave enough to write about my luxurious secret frozen pizza life + recipes

We live in a time where food and food costs have an air of dystopia surrounding it. The end of 2024 had my mind spinning on where does fine dining end or begin anymore. It is always been such a flimsy and flexible border, of what is “good” or high quality or haute cuisine or tasteful or whatever else word fits the ever moving criteria.

And with rising costs of food, the idea of luxury continues to be misconstrued as a thing meant for a percentage of humanity and not for all. Two things succinctly helped remedy my brain of the cloudy thoughts I would have on the notions of the aforementioned. One of them being so embarrassingly simple I am at once both impressed and shocked by my mental laziness all these years….I looked up the definition of luxury. Which literally means Great Comfort. That’s luxury. Not a price tag, not any other qualifier, just, comfort that is really really really good that it’s great.

The other is me taking in a professional loss this August that sent me looking for answers outside of food and led me down the path of the biography of one Estée Lauder, (self discovery will find you on roads you never knew existed). More on that topic later, but if you’re curious, a good place to begin is this podcast episode.

Two catalysts set the stage for me to be primed for Martha Stewart’s documentary. And let me be clear, not in all the ways, I am less compelled by her not being a billionaire anymore or her post prison TV flips. Coupled with growing up firmly in the camp of Ina Garten, Martha Stewart represented a scandal I barely understood, fodder for SNL skits and someone I mistakenly put in the camp of basic. In spite of the former, she got me in her singular thirst for excellence, not perfection, but excellence.

Naively, I believed the documentary to be something I could write about without the added effect of indoctrination.

And yet, in real time, as I’m watching along, quite aware of my allegiance shifting to Stewart, a scene takes place that deifies her ethos for me. We cut to a flashback of an interview, with a man who seems to be unaware that Martha is fully realized:

Interviewer: Someone watching Martha, or reading Martha, might just be driven up the wall because they’ll never get to that perfect point of casual, easy perfection.

Martha: But they might. They may not ever make that cake, but they can dream about it.

And in that moment, I had found what I never knew I needed. She was, unapologetically so, reaching for greatness, and moreover, unafraid to expect and assume anything else from her audience, without indictment of inaction should they choose to dream instead of bake. Martha had guts and conviction. And for the most part, it resonated with America.

Her guts notwithstanding, Martha’s love of precise opulence, her fantastical ideas of dinner parties, her visual cues of abundance were not only visionary at the time but to what I equate to the modern supper club.

And though Martha’s mission of never having to endure mediocrity in the domesticity of life …..there is no such thing as a bad meal, if you have rituals in your cooking, you can always guarantee an excellent product, not predictable but excellent due to the habit of expecting more from yourself.

In that spirit, the recipe I’m featuring in today’s newsletter is about making the best of a shortcut, no, making the best happen, period. I make a lot of homemade pizza dough and I make a lot of things from scratch, but I find every so often, I crave a night making frozen pizza into singular pies of style and art.

I bring you the best frozen pizza hack, : aka how I make a $7 frozen pizza into a $25 pizza fit for a natural wine bar on the east side of any city or reason #541 to invest in cast irons. This is my Martha Stewart perfect cake moment except you can dream and make this simultaneously.