An Ode to Pizza

            For the next few months I will be on a soft food diet, post-oral-surgery, which means nothing chewy or hard or crunchy or sticky. But really what it means to me is, no pizza. I already miss stuffed crust pizza, and Spinach ricotta pizza, and plain pizza, and four cheese pizza, and pizza with eggplant parmesan on top, and pizza with white clam sauce, and pizza with artichokes and peppers and mushrooms. I can find soft bread for sandwiches, and I don’t eat much steak, and I’ve been avoiding whole nuts forever, but even the softest, cheese-filled crust pizza is going to choke me if I can’t chew it well enough.

            Unfortunately, there is a pizza place, a really good one, right around the corner from me and I can smell their food every day. I could probably order one of their baked pasta dishes, but I don’t want to, because what I really want are the garlic knots, or a meatball hero, or a mushroom salad, and a crispy artichoke pizza, and, really, I can make a pretty good lasagna on my own.

            I can still eat vegetables, even broccoli and cauliflower, as long as I put them in the food processor and blend them to death, and I can have a hamburger, as long as I cut it into toddler-sized bites, but pizza in a blender is no longer pizza, so pizza is not on the menu.

            I’m looking forward to being fully healed and able to eat not only pizza but also bagels and chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts, and Twizzlers, and, oh my god, an actual apple! A granny smith apple!

            Food is one of the few things in my life that has reliably brought me joy (puppies are wonderful, but they also bark, and demand to go out in the snow, and, you know, expect me to pick up their poop). But I’ve had to be on all kinds of limited diets since childhood: for religious reasons, or financial reasons, or weight and health reasons, and it all sucks.

But I spent almost a week after the oral surgery not eating much at all, because even when I felt hungry, I was just too nauseous to enjoy the food, so I decided that even on this soft food diet, I’m going to try to enjoy everything I can eat. Like Matzo ball soup. I could live on matzo ball soup, really – with the overcooked carrots and potatoes and chicken, and the matzo balls! And it’s not too spicy or acidic or crunchy or chewy. Or ice cream in every flavor! And there’s tuna salad, and risotto, and pasta, and chocolate mousse! There’s a lot of wonderful food to eat and I’m not going to go hungry.

            But, still, no pizza.

            Harrumph.

            If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?