Pizza Knight
Food and traditions and time going too fast
It’s Saturday night in my house.
The shades are drawn, the lights are off and the whole family – me, my husband, our two teenage kids and our two dogs – are all piled into the living room for our weekly pizza and movie night.
For years, these Saturday nights were sacrosanct. Even though we all sit down to eat dinner as a family every night, Saturdays are special. We make homemade pizza from scratch and eat on the sofa to watch a movie together.
The kids knew not to make plans that required us to collect them on a Saturday night because it’s the one night my husband and I, both small business owners, can have a few beers and completely switch off. I look forward to Saturday night all week.
One of my favourite drawings my son did when he was little was turning our pizza night tradition into … Pizza Knight. I love word play and puns – the cornier, the better – and I love this so much. Pizza sword! Pizza spear! Pizza shoes! Peperoni [sic] spikes!
But things change. They always do.
We’ve gone from watching all the animated or Disney movies to the new family favourite, true stories.
My daughter just graduated from secondary school and is out on Saturday nights more often than she’s home now, but my son doesn’t mind because that means he gets to eat her pizza too – he has a typical 15-year-old boy’s bottomless appetite.
She wants to go Interrailing around Europe next summer. She even has the guidebook already. I’ll have to get used to her empty spot on the sofa.
Right now she’s on holiday with her friends in Portugal, spending all day at the beach or by the pool and every night out drinking cocktails.
So I played around with the PhotoRoom app and texted her some pics this past weekend to say we missed her for our weekly pizza night – and that Pizza Knight wished he was out at the beach and drinking cocktails too. I crack myself up.
Eighteen years seemed like such a long time to have her at home with us. So many pizzas, so many movies, so many Saturdays. It wasn’t enough.
I even co-wrote a pizza cookbook: Making Artisan Pizza at Home by Philip Dennhardt and yours truly. I tested all the recipes one pizza at a time every week for 18 months, except for the final push ahead of the manuscript submission, when I was making pizzas two or three times a week to meet the deadline. This meant the kids got a lot of leftover pizza for their school lunches until they finally begged, ‘Please, Mom, no more pizza!’ Said no kids ever – except for my kids.
A version of this piece originally appeared in issue 1 of Scoop magazine. If you like this, you would also enjoy ‘Creating non-traditional traditions’ by Caryna Camerino in issue 2.
Loving Pizza Knight!