Why would you do that to a perfectly good tomato?

Yum!!!

Christopher came home with good news.  He had just landed a job at a local pizza restaurant and had spent the last two hours completing his orientation training.  Pizza dough, sauce, and cheese certainly do combine for a delicious taste treat.  Christopher loves pizza, but there was just one small problem.  The pizza kitchen was lined with ingredients.  Some of them he recognized, but many of them were a complete mystery to him. What were those red wrinkled things?  How do you tell the difference between pepperoni and salami?  Was that crumbled sausage or crumbled hamburger, and what in the world is an artichoke heart?  None of the ingredients were labeled, and he had never eaten many of these foods before.  Besides, they were all cut up into tiny pieces which made it difficult for him to tell if those were green peppers or green onions in that bin.

Green peppers...love them!

He assumed most people knew the difference between pepperoni and salami, so he didn't want to embarrass himself by asking his new boss which bin the green peppers were in.  This was an issue he hadn't anticipated.  Zucchini...he had definitely heard of that before, but which one these ingredients was the zucchini?   He had no idea that there were so many different things that you could even put on a pizza.  His "food inexperience" was showing, and he wasn't quite sure what to do about it.  He was scheduled to work in just a few days, and he needed some help.

Artichokes are so good!

We went to our refrigerator to see if we could fill in the gaps in his "food awareness".  Using the menu he had brought home from the restaurant, we searched our vegetable bin for sample ingredients.  I showed him the green peppers and zucchini.  He recognized them immediately and then realized that they just look different when they are all cut up.  I didn't have any artichokes, so I tried to draw a mental picture for him.  I  told him they looked like big green flowers, but it was clear by the look on his face that my description was inadequate.

The contents of our refrigerator didn't satisfy his questions, so he decided to Google them instead.  I am continually amazed at the sheer volume of information on the Internet.  You can find just about anything on it.  With just a few clicks of his mouse, we were staring at artichokes and sun dried tomatoes on the computer screen.  We went down the list of ingredients on the menu and found images of each one.  We were able to find pictures of them cut up, sliced, diced, and whole.  In no time at all, we had identified the entire list of ingredients, and Christopher was satisfied that he would be able to assemble any pizza without a problem.

Sun dried tomatoes...a great idea!

There was just one thing he was wondering about.  Sun dried tomatoes, what was up with that?  He wanted to know, why do people "dry" tomatoes and then eat them?  Laughing, I explained that it intensifies the flavor.  He looked at me with a skeptical and very uncertain look.  I answered his doubt by telling him that he would just have to give them a try.  I reminded him that there were lots of foods lately that he thought looked bad but tasted great. 

Who knew that food could be this complicated?  I guess there are just so many things about eating that we learn over the years and just never give a second thought to, but eating is "a whole new world" for Christopher.  I suspect Christopher will have many more questions about food and eating.  I'm sure I will be answering that same old question again...what is that?

Christopher makes the best pizza!

By the way, Christopher worked yesterday for the first time at the pizza restaurant.  He didn't mix up the crumbled sausage with the crumbled hamburger, and he knew the difference between the green peppers and the green onions.  Not surprisingly, we had pizza for dinner last night.  Christopher made it for us, and it was definitely the best pizza that I have ever tasted!


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More tomorrow...