The Parable of the Pizza

The when I got to my institute class this week, I found a basil leaf stuck to my scripture case.

But Awkward Mormon Girl, why would there be a basil leaf on your scripture case?

Because my scripture case was sitting on my passenger seat. The same passenger seat upon which I dumped basil leaves just a few days ago. Clearly.

I don't get it.

I'll explain.

I am now the chair of my ward's book club. Before this calling, I'd only been part of one and a half book club and was not terribly familiar with them. But my impression of books clubs—now hear me out—was that they are adorable events where everyone gathers in an adorably decorated home and eats adorable treats and says clever, possibly adorable things to each other. After, of course, having read an adorable book.

With those items in mind, I proceeded to plan my first book club meeting as chair.

We already had an adorable book. The previous chair had chosen The Wednesday Wars, a book that I really like. It's deep and exciting and also, yes, very adorable. Check.

An adorably decorated home? My apartment is classy and comfortable, but not adorable per se. The bishop's second counselor's wife volunteered her home, which is all cute picture frames and crafts and matching furniture. Check.

Adorable treats? Check! "I'll make cream puffs," said the second counselor's wife. Cream puffs are a plot point in The Wednesday Wars.

That left saying clever, adorable things was, apparently, my job as chair. I made a list of possible discussion points. That would have to do.

Then I decided to bring pizza. Pizza is not a plot point in The Wednesday Wars, but the book takes place on Long Island. And what also takes places on Long Island? Brooklyn and all the things that happen in Brooklyn take place on Long Island...including the creation of delicious margherita pizza.

Why did I want to bring pizza? It's hard to explain. My whole life has been a struggle between knowing that I don't need people to be happy and wanting to interact with them anyways. A struggle between being able to describe exactly what I'm thinking when I'm writing but never being able to say what I want to say when speaking. A struggle between being confident in who I am but not knowing how to show that confidence in the way I present myself. A struggle between feeling like I wasn't made to be social but, as a human, being a naturally social thing.

I go to social events. And I try. But I'm not good with people. And I'm not good at putting together adorable things like cutely decorated homes and cream puffs. I don't get that stuff. But I do get food. And so, to make up for my lack of skillz in other areas in which a book club chair should have skillz, I was going to make food. I was going to make a darn good pizza!

At least, that was the plan. I'd never made a pizza by myself before. So the week before the meeting, I practiced my mad pizza skillz.

The best way to make a margherita pizza, according to a combination of advice from the Food Nanny and my father, is to use a pre-made crust, a bunch of tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and a little basil plant you can leave on your windowsill. You bake the pre-made crust a little to make it nice and crisp. Then you chop the tomatoes, mix them with some olive oil, some salt, and some pepper, and spread them on the crust. You put the crust back in the oven. Then, when the tomatoes are nice and bubbly, you slice the fresh mozzarella on top. You put a little parmesan cheese and a little more olive oil with salt and pepper on top. You bake it some more, until bubbly. Then you pluck some fresh basil leaves from the plant, wash them (because you're not a barbarian), and toss them on top of the pizza. And then you have a margherita pizza, fresh and warm and tasty and ready to be consumed with a bottle of root beer.

That's the theory, anyways. My trial pizza ended up being a little burnt around the edges. But, all in all, a job well done.

After making the trial pizza, I had one pre-made crust, some fresh mozarella, some parmesan, and some olive oil left over. I figured I could use them to make the real pizza a week later. I also still had the little basil plant.

It was the kind of basil plant that you close in a plastic box and then don't touch it and it takes care of itself. This confused me to no end, truthfully. The plant came with no instructions whatsoever. At first I opened the plastic box because I thought it would be better, but then the basil plant (whom I'd named Basil) shriveled up.

So then I looked online to learn more about the care and keeping of basil plants in plastic boxes and learned that the plastic box was, in fact, Basil's greenhouse that kept him alive.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Oh, a greenhouse! Obviously. How could I not have guessed that?

I put a little water on Basil's roots, shut the plastic box/greenhouse up again, and nursed the little guy back to green, leafy health.

So far, so good.

For a week, I lived in a constant state of anxiety about the pre-made crust. I poked it almost daily, making sure it hadn't gone stale. I kept checking Basil, too, to make sure that he didn't shrivel up again. But the crust stayed supple, and Basil stayed unshriveled, and soon the day of the book club meeting arrived.

With care, I removed the pre-made crust from the pantry. It had become inexplicably cracked, but (I confirmed again) not stale. I spread the chopped tomatoes with olive oil (which I'd mixed the night before) over the crust and placed it in the oven to bake.

Then everything went wrong.

As I chopped the fresh mozzarella, I realized that when it's a week old, fresh mozzarella is no longer fresh. Not that the cheese was rancid or moldy, because it wasn't. But the consistency was a little different than it had been when I'd first bought it. I hoped that wouldn't be a problem.

I took the pizza out of the oven and covered the tomatoes with mozzarella. Then I sprinkled parmesan over the mozzarella. Except wait. Because although the mozzarella was not moldy, tiny sections of the grated parmesan were!

Rapidly, my fingers working like speedily pecking birds, I plucked the moldy bits of parmesan off the pizza. At least, I plucked off the bits that I could see. Because basement apartments are dark. And I'm legally blind. Even when wearing glasses and/or contacts, my vision is spotty at best. At least when it comes to finding grains of slightly moldy, light-colored parmesan on a bed of equally light-colored mozzarella. I think that even someone with perfect vision would have a hard time doing that.

I was running out of time. I shook salt and pepper over the layer of cheese! I drizzled olive oil on all of it! Then I threw that puppy back in the oven and started stripping Basil of leaves.

As I pulled off the leaves, one by one, I noticed something odd about them. Some of them had brown splotches. Was that concerning? Should I be concerned? I decided that brown splotches were probably a normal part of being a basil plant, but just to be safe, I tore off the discolored bits and threw them away.

I washed the basil leaves because, again, I'm not a barbarian. Then I brought the hot and wonderful-smelling pizza out of the oven and artfully arranged the leaves on the bubbling mozzarella cheese.

I may not be into making adorable refreshments, but I thought the pizza looked really good!

This isn't the pizza that I made, but the pizza shown here looks similar to mine.

I took off the apron I'd worn to protect my white shirt from the olive oil. Now to transport the pizza. But how? The pizza pan had little holes in the bottom, which meant that I couldn't just carry it without pizza grease getting all over everything. But I didn't have any sort of thing large enough to carry it in, either. I have a bench scraper in my kitchen. I have a lazy slotted turner! How could it be that I didn't have a pizza-carrying receptacle?!

I decided that it would almost fit on a large plate, so I transferred the pizza onto the slightly-too-small plate. Too late, I remembered the crack in the pizza crust! I almost tore the pizza in half. I definitely succeeded in making it look far less pretty. Then I decided that almost fitting on a large plate was not good enough, so I transferred the pizza back to the pizza pan. Definitely less pretty.

In this process, I touched the cheese and discovered that it was somewhat...rubbery. But I'd cooked the pizza perfectly! If anything, I'd cooked it somewhat less than I had during the trial batch...oh. Was this what happened when the fresh mozzarella was not-quite-fresh? Ah dear. Well...that was disappointing, but it would probably be okay.

By this time, I really needed to get going. I grabbed some dish towels and a sauté pan lid and contrived a way to carry the pizza pan without getting pizza grease on my white shirt. And that's when I took a better look at the basil.

When you put the basil on the pizza, it's supposed to wilt slightly. This basil had wilted...a lot more than slightly. It was almost completely blackened. It looked like it had given up all will to live.

Weird, to say the least.

I pinched a basil leaf from the pizza. I examined it. I put it in my mouth.

Disgusting!

I was in trouble. This pizza was in trouble. I needed new basil, and fast. There was no time to go the store. But luckily, I remembered that I'd seen a bigger basil plant in a plastic box on my parents' windowsill that morning during Little Sister's birthday breakfast.

I ripped all the basil from the pizza. I transported the pizza to my car, put it on the towel I'd set on the passenger seat, and quickly drove to my parents' house.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: I'm literally here to take your leaves and leave!

I snatched a handful of leaves from their plant, washed them, and ran back to the pizza in the car. I started to put the new basil on the pizza...

...except...

...brown splotches. I put a leaf in my mouth.

Disgusting!

I tore all the basil off the pizza. It would have to be a plain cheese pizza instead of a delicious margherita pizza. It was too late to find non-splotchy basil. Tossing the leaves onto the passenger seat, I put the pedal to the metal and soon pulled up in front of the home that the second counselor shared with his wife.

I then discovered that the sauté pan lid had slid up onto the pizza during the drive, peeling the cheese away from the crust. Try as I might, I could not fix the lumps created by this mishap. And, when I was getting the pizza out of the car, despite the towels and the lid, I somehow got pizza grease on my white shirt. I was on the verge of tears. I didn't want to go inside. I did not want to go inside.

But I did.

When I walked into the second counselor's home, I looked around at the adorable kitchen area. I looked at the adorable tablecloth laid out for the meeting and the bottles of soda (bottles of soda are also a plot point in The Wednesday Wars) in the bucket of ice. The cream puffs weren't laid out yet, but I was certain that they would be adorable and as close to perfect as cream puffs could get. I looked at my pizza, and I felt depressed.

The second counselor's wife glanced at the lumpy, basil-less, stringy-cheesy pizza and said something like, "That looks delicious!" Then she offered the use of her oven to keep the pizza warm.

I was dazed and confused. I couldn't believe how gracious she was being, to accept the terrible pizza. Not only had she not disparaged it, she'd actually complimented it. She'd offered it the shelter of her oven, as if it were a prize-winning pie and not a paltry attempt.

I decided that maybe the pizza didn't look as bad as I'd thought. But wait until people tasted it! Then the truth would come out. They'd realize that the cheese was rubbery, probably the crust was stale (because even though I'd tested it eleven thousand times, I couldn't possibly be sure that it wasn't stale), the parmesan had been in a container with other, moldy grains of parmesan, and shouldn't this pizza have basil on it?

Ward members arrived for the club. We blessed the food and began to eat.

Everybody took a slice of pizza. I cringed.

Everybody ate their slice of pizza. I waited. But no one said anything. No one said anything. A few people scraped some of the tomatoes off their slices, but nobody seemed averse to the crust...or the mozzarella cheese...or even the parmesan cheese.  And when Pepper arrived a little late, the Seamstress said, "I almost finished off the last of the pizza, but I decided to leave some for you."

They actually liked it. Because the pizza didn't match up to what I wanted it to be, I thought it wasn't good. Yet nobody else thought that. Nobody had a problem with the pizza but me.

And then I realized...maybe I am a pizza. I am a pizza, and social events are a book club. I think that the people at the book club don't like me, but really I don't like me because I think I should be what I want me to be. But nobody else wants me to be other than what I am. People are fine with me. Nay, more than fine with me. They want to eat me, probably.

You know?

Like most people, I learn things about life, then forget them and have to relearn them. For the meantime, though, I've learned this lesson well. Two days after the book club, I went to Jumpin's baby shower. The hostess had asked me to bring "cute cookies or cupcakes."

Knowing her, when she said "cute," I knew that she meant "cute." "Cute" being just another one of the many synonyms of "adorable." "Adorable" still being something that I struggle with.

I bought some Milanos. Two flavors. Milanos are classy and delicious. I even arranged them in a circle on a plate.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: And that's as cute as it's going to get.

But you know what? I didn't really care. I didn't care when I jostled the plate and the nicely arranged circle became scrambled. I didn't care when the baby shower turned out to be oh-so-perfectly decorated and color coordinated. I didn't care when it turned out that some of the Milano filling had melted. I didn't care when someone discovered that I'd taped the plastic wrap to the plate too tightly and we were unable to get it off without turning the whole thing over, so people had to stick their hands under the plastic wrap awkwardly and grasp cookies and get melting Milano filling all over their fingers.

I didn't care, because I knew I was a pizza at a book club, metaphorically speaking, and people would like me even if my plate of cookies wasn't the best or the cutesiest. And by "pizza" I mean "Milanos." And by "book club" I mean "baby shower." But the sentiment remains the same.