My dad is a big foodie – he loves all types of food and even more so, he loves cooking all types of food (thank heavens for my mother, who does not like cooking as much).  And when we went to Italy for the first time in 2009, my dad became obsessed with his next food adventure – pizza.  Not just regular pizza thrown in the oven, but real authentic Italian pizza in a real authentic Italian pizza oven.  So for a few years, he saved money to finally buy an authentic pizza oven that came all the way from Italy, and for the last two summers we have been engrossed in the pizza world, inspiring me to feel that the only appropriate way to keep this pizza going is to document the entire process (and use it mercilessly for my senior project).

Now Mike doesn’t just make one kind of pizza – he makes them all.  Regular pepperoni, bar-b-que chicken, garlic chicken, margherita, Thai chicken (a crowd favorite), spicy buffalo, pesto, and Mexican taco (my personal favorite).  It’s always a huge ordeal that takes most of the day – heating up the oven to a substantially hot and burning degree, making the homemade dough (thanks to mama!), cooking, cutting, mixing all of the various foods he uses, and finally making the pizzas. And there’s usually way too much pizza, so with either a gaggle of neighbors and friends over or pizzas to deliver around the block, the food is always shared.  It’s become a family event that happens almost weekly, and I’ve decided there’s nothing more fun for us to do.  We love pizza.  And the ways we get to spend time with each other and others while we have pizza has probably made it more fun – though that taco pizza is better than life itself (its that bottom picture – go salivate).