Pizza Scottoline

Lisa Quarantine, here.

Baking pizza.

I know. I’m supposed to be on a diet, which means I should be avoiding carbohydrates, but all I do is eat carbohydrates, read about carbohydrates, and make even more carbohydrates than I already have in my house.

I’m sure this is an aspect of quarantine.

Here’s what it reminds me of: when my daughter was little and we had a long plane trip, during which I had to amuse her with only a cocktail napkin. 

Luckily, she was easily amused.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

You can do 400 things with a napkin to entertain your child.

You can put it on your head.

You can pretend you’re sneezing.

You can act like it’s a hair ribbon or a bow tie.

You can put it over your mouth and pop your tongue through it.

The tongue-through-the-napkin is my best trick.

And it’s something you can’t unsee.

Thank God you haven’t seen it.

In any event, quarantine to me feels like finding a million things to do without leaving your living room.

And that’s if you’re lucky.

The heroes among us have to go out and save lives, stock shelves, deliver packages, or make sure the post office stays open and the electricity stays on.

We get to play with the napkins.

Yet, we bitch.

Not me.

I keep my bitching in perspective.

And so that’s why we begin pizza making.

I dream of pizza and crave pizza and want pizza very badly, but I don’t live near a pizza place and I got time on my hands anyway.

And a friend of mine told me that he makes pizza every night, and I was thinking, why can’t I make pizza every night?

You know what I do every night?

Watch TV and do needlepoint.

I’ve already stitched five needlepoint pillows, which is a land-speed record.

I have not stitched five needlepoint anythings in the past 10 years and normally it takes me like three years to do a single pillow.

You can see I’m not good at math.

The point is I’m doing a lot of stitching and the only remedy is carbohydrates.

So I bought a book about making pizza by Joe Beddia, the owner of Pizzeria Beddia, about which I knew nothing except that I saw it on Queer Eye. That’s how good my lockdown is. I had to find out from Netflix that Pizzeria Beddia, called the Best Pizza in America by Bon Appétit, is in Philadelphia.

But I’m still not leaving my house.

I’m not even leaving my kitchen.

So I ordered the book to make the pizza.

Of course I haven’t really started yet.

What I did was shop, which is my specialty.

My friend recommended that I buy something called a pizza steel, and I had no idea what that was, but it just came and it turns out to be a flat piece of steel shaped like a pizza.

I’m a mystery writer, yet did not guess the ending.

But then I read the directions for the pizza steel and it turns out that you need to order a pizza paddle, too, which will delay me actually doing anything instead of just thinking about it for another two weeks.

Although, to my credit, in the meantime I did order flour and I was even able to score yeast.

You know how hard it is to come by yeast these days.

There are two times in a woman’s life when we get involved with yeast.

In our early years, when we have too much, and later, when we’re crones like me, and we would do anything for yeast, a fine white powder as valuable as cocaine.

Or at least so I hear.

I don’t know anything about cocaine, except what I see on Netflix.

If it’s not on Netflix, I remain ignorant.

And if it has no carbohydrates, I’m not interested.

As far as I’m concerned, cocaine has nothing on chocolate cake.

When I get all the stuff to make the pizza, I’m going to do it.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

It can’t be worse than my latest banana bread, which never fully baked because I added pineapple at the last minute, since I love pineapple upside-down cake but did not decide to make one until I was already making banana bread.

Here’s a pro tip:

You can’t bake two different cakes at the same time.

But I’m good with a cocktail napkin, so you never know.

Stay tuned.

Look for Lisa and Francesca’s humor collection, “I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses,” and Lisa’s novel, “Someone Knows,” in stores now. Also look for Francesca’s debut novel, “Ghosts of Harvard,” on sale now.