cob oven Archives - Good Food St. Louis

Pizza Makes the World Go Round

June 2, 2022

I’m not sure just what dough tossing accomplishes, but it’s fun to try.

Easy, Breezy, Cheesy

Pizza is one of my favorite dishes to make at the farm. Maybe that’s because there’re so many willing helpers.

Assembling the Italian pie calls for dough rollers, sauce smearers, pepperoni poppers, cheese sprinklers, and oven tenders. “It takes a village.” But that’s the fun part of producing a designer pizza outdoors.

The Great Memorial Day Pizza Roll Out

I add the finishing touch for a little extra size.

Some pizza toppings: pepperoni, Mozzarella, olives, mushrooms, and basil.

Not Exactly the Food Pyramid—but Close

For the ingredients, we used dough balls, Italian house-made tomato sauce, and Mozzarella from DiGregorio’s Grocery on the Hill. (There’s some family disagreement as to whether or not Provel cheese should be included, but we’ll ignore that for now.)

Good Times Call for Pizza

My youngest granddaughter, Coco, continued her 11th birthday celebration through the Memorial Day weekend with a few school friends at the farms. Making the classic pie was the highlight of one of the evenings.

It’s so good to see kids lay aside their video and digital devices to do ordinary things that youngsters once did for entertainment.

I think this was supposed to be a heart-shaped pizza. No matter the shape, they were quite good.

Artichoke pizza

Robin tosses pizza. Coco samples the pepperoni. Her friend seems uncertain of this crazy pizza bake off. Lucy smears a crust with sauce. And JC turns the cooked pieces into slices.

Fresh from the oven, hot and hearty

“No anchovies on mine. Just straight up pepperoni with a dash of sausage.”

Fast Fired

Our home-built, wood-fired pizza oven has fared well over the years. We had to redo it once after an invasion of carpenter bees, but it’s working now despite a few cracks. The temperature gets up to 800 degrees. That kind of heat makes professional pizza in minutes.

Batter Up!

Pizza power gives the oomph you need to bring down a whimsical piñata.

Memorial Day Memories

And so ended Memorial Day 2022. But memories of those who fought so we could enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” live in our hearts always.

Kids, Pigs, Rabbits, Chicken, Fish and Puppies

July 12, 2021

Bunny hugging

Memories Are Made of These

Each summer, when I was a kid, my family made a trip from our home in Washington, DC to Culpeper, Virginia. It was the place my father had grown up and the home of relatives, that went by such names as Cousin Abby, Aunt Sal, and Cousin Nall.

I rode my first horse on one of those farms. I watched a chicken go from the barnyard to the frying pan within a half hour. I ate canned whole hog sausage, picked apples, milked my first (and last) cow, and stepped in a manure pile more than once. I sat on a big porch with fly paper hanging from the ceiling as I helped to string bushels of green beans in the summer heat. All those activities were so foreign to me as a city kid.

Ahhh . . . .

Ol’ MacDonald Had a Farm

This past weekend when friends visited from New York City, along with their four children, I relived some of my childhood farm adventures.

Since our place in Rolla is now more of a weekend getaway than a working farm, we took the visitors to a few local farms, where they could see and hold a variety of small animals

Feeding the chickens

“Baa, baa black sheep, have you any wool?”

A well-fed porker

Pig, pond, and playmates

An albino rabbit with pink eyes

Puppy love

Lunch time for a litter of ten golden doodles.

Rachel shows that puppy love isn’t just for kids.

Fish were jumping and easy to catch.

The catch of the day: catfish from the farm pond. Actually, the kids caught six.

After “farming” it was time for a jump at Fugitive Beach. Located several miles from our farm, the water hole is a creative use of an old rock quarry.

We worked up quite an appetite, which Austin handled nicely with hand-tossed pizza for the outdoor cob oven.

The cob oven gets up to 900 degree and cooks pizza quickly. Which was good, because we were hungry by day’s end. Paul kept us awake with an evening of fireworks.