So Cal Pizza — Building Something Bright When the World Goes Quiet

Mom sent another box. Not biscuits this time — a care package that was so Colleen Gallagher it could have had her fingerprints notarized. Beef jerky she made from last fall's elk, vacuum-sealed in bags labeled with masking tape and a Sharpie. Summer sausage from the butcher in Roundup. A bag of Colleen's oatmeal cookies that were crumbled to pieces from shipping but tasted exactly right. And at the bottom, wrapped in a dish towel, a small cast iron skillet. Six inches. The one she uses for eggs.

I held that skillet for a long time. It weighs maybe two pounds. It felt like it weighed more. It felt like it weighed exactly as much as a kitchen in Montana at 5 AM with the wood stove going and the coffee on and the eggs crackling in butter and the sky outside still dark and full of stars. Two pounds. A whole life in two pounds.

I can't cook here. There's no kitchen access for patients, which makes sense — you don't hand sharp objects and open flames to a ward full of traumatic brain injuries, that's just policy — but I put the skillet on my bedside table. It sits there next to the phone and the water cup and the pill bottles, and it is the only thing in this room that is mine from before.

The nightmares shifted this week. Same road, same sound, but now sometimes the dream changes at the end and I'm standing in a kitchen. Not doing anything. Just standing there. Dr. Hannigan, the psychologist they've assigned me, says the brain is trying to find safe places even in the dreams. I didn't tell him about the skillet. I don't want him to turn the skillet into a symbol. It's not a symbol. It's a skillet. It's my mother's skillet and it smells like seasoning oil and fifty years of eggs and I put my hand on it at night when the dark gets loud and the iron is cool and solid and it doesn't go anywhere. Things that don't go anywhere matter right now.

The jerky is good. I've been rationing it — three pieces a day, after dinner, sitting in the courtyard if the weather holds. Elk jerky in a D.C. spring. The taste doesn't match the place. That's fine. I don't match the place either. I eat the jerky and think about the Musselshell and the Bulls and the 800 acres and the fact that somewhere out there Dad is moving cattle and the grass is green and the world didn't stop. It just stopped for me. Temporarily. Temporarily.

But one morning they opened the kitchen for the full afternoon, and I didn’t reach for the eggs. I stood there looking at the counter space and thought about color—red and yellow peppers, the pale green of avocado flesh—and I wanted to build something. Not complicated. Just something with more pieces than two eggs and butter. So Cal Pizza is what came together: dough stretched by hand on a floured peel, goat cheese in little dollops like the snow patches you see on the Crazies in late April, and that first bite where the char meets the cool avocado and you remember your hands can still make a thing that’s good.

So Cal Pizza

Prep Time: 1 hr | Cook Time: 10 min | Total Time: 1 hr 10 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

• 1 ball Best Pizza Dough (or Food Processor Dough or Thin Crust Dough)
• 1/4 red bell pepper
• 1/4 yellow bell pepper
• 1/4 small red onion
• 8 to 10 leaves fresh basil
• 1/3 cup Homemade Easy Pizza Sauce
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
• 4 ounces soft goat cheese
• 1/2 avocado
• Kosher salt
• Semolina flour or cornmeal, for dusting the pizza peel

Instructions

1. Prepare the dough. Follow the Best Pizza Dough recipe to prepare the dough. (This takes about 15 minutes to make and 45 minutes to rest.)
2. Preheat the oven. Place a pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 500°F. OR preheat your pizza oven.
3. Make the sauce. Make the Homemade Pizza Sauce.
4. Prep the toppings. Thinly slice the peppers. Thinly slice the onion. Thinly slice (chiffonade) the basil leaves. Remove the avocado pit.
5. Stretch the dough. When the oven is ready, dust a pizza peel with cornmeal or semolina flour. (If you don’t have a pizza peel, you can use a rimless baking sheet or the back of a rimmed baking sheet. But a pizza peel is well worth the investment!) Stretch the dough into a circle, then gently place the dough onto the pizza peel.
6. Assemble the pizza. Spread a thin layer of the pizza sauce onto the dough. Top with the mozzarella cheese. Then add sliced peppers, onions, and dollops of goat cheese. Using a spoon, scoop out small dollops of the avocado flesh onto the pizza. Sprinkle the top with kosher salt.
7. Bake and serve. Transfer the pizza to the pizza stone in the oven using the pizza peel, and bake until the cheese is melted, about 7 minutes (or 1 minute in a pizza oven). Allow to cool slightly, then garnish with basil and serve.

Nutrition (per serving)

Nutrition information not available for this recipe.