Saturday, January 30. Pancakes. Sorelli's Pizza. Wedding Singer. I don't think I've mentioned that our happy home is, for the first time in almost twenty years, able to receive cable television. The reason we've not had that (or satellite, or any other equivalent) is half that the cable never came here (it still doesn't), and half that the two adults in the house have a dim view of the medium. Mary Ann out-and-out despises mainstream television. (She's perfectly fine, however, with fringe services like Fox News.) As for me, I've watched little television since around 1964, when I gave up our family's diet of three or four hours every night. I came back to it in the 1970s, but only to watch Johnny Carson and, later, David Letterman. When I got cable in the 1980s, it was mainly to watch the Weather Channel, and then only in season.
What made our current connection possible is a new service from AT&T called U-Verse. They sneaked a fiber optic cable to within a hundred feet or so from the Cool Water Ranch while I wasn't looking. They didn't even have to run a new phone cable to the house. The service ame with a gadget that does everything a video recorder does, but without tapes or disks. Not only that, but the internet comes up at three times the speed of the DSL I had before. Maybe it will even stay on when it rains!
If this all sounds like a free commercial for AT&T, I'm sorry--I really am thrilled by it all, including the cost. I do not own stock in AT&T, but I might be buying some. Imagine: the stock that used to be the one owned by widows and orphans, now an exciting company!
Breakfast at Mattina Bella. Mary Ann dug into her favorite multi-meat, overcooked-to-crispy omelette. I had a short stack of pancakes. It is the unanimous opinion of my family that Mattina Bella makes the best pancakes around. Since that includes the hard-to-please thinking of Mary Leigh--whose favorite breakfast is pancakes--it is saying something. We discussed this with Vincent Riccobono, who owns the place. He shared a secret about his flapjacks that he strongly impressed on me not to repeat. (I think secret recipes are silly, but I respect the requests of those who ask me not to divulge them.) I asked him if he'd ever noticed that the first pancake on the griddle is always terrible. "Absolutely," he agreed. "That's the one the employees or me eat. It's never right."
I forgot to ask him where his bacon comes from. It's thick, smoky, just the right amount sweet, and lean. One of these days I'll convince Vincent to serve café au lait made with Union coffee and chicory, and it will be the perfect breakfast place.
We passed in front of Sorelli's Pizzeria, about which I've heard a good deal of positive buzz, most of it about the products of its brick pizza oven. Sorelli's is in a restaurant space which has seen many restaurants come and go over the years. It's only been open a couple of months, but Mary Ann and I decided then and there that we'd return later for dinner. Mary Leigh, as she does ever more frequently, had her own social agenda for the evening.
It was really cold and blowing when we arrived at around seven. Only one door separated the dining room from the zephyrs, of course. But they had a table far away from that, from which we could see the pizza oven. It had gas jets inside, not wood--but that's still two or three steps up from the typical. We started with soup and salad, then on to the pizza. Mary Ann's followed the same lines as the omelette she had earlier in the day: lots of different meats, competing with one another, their juices and fat flowing around the mushrooms, bell peppers, etc., etc.
My pie was the precise opposite. The first time I go to a new pizzeria, I get a cheese pizza. I like that anyway, but for journalistic purposes it's useful because it lets me see clearly the quality of the three most important aspects of the pie: the crust, the sauce, and the quality of the cheese. In this case, I found a well-made crust whose only flaw was that it had been underbaked. I like a pizza that has a few charred spots around the edges and here and there on the bottom. (This is universal in pizzas in Italy, and I agree with their taste in this particular.) The sauce was a very pleasant surprise. I think these guys may not be cooking it before applying it to the pizza. This sounds unconventional (and is), but in my opinion it makes the most vivid-tasting pizza. It's the best idea I ever learned from Chef Andrea Apuzzo, and I've made my sauce that way ever since.
I ordered a large, with two plans in mind. One was to have leftover slices to have for small lunches through the week. (You can make a refrigerated leftover pizza almost as good as the moment it came out of the oven by just putting it on a hot griddle for a few minutes. The underbaked-ness of this one will actually be a plus.) The other was to see if they'd sell me one of the pans that they serve the large ones in. I need it to accommodate the big springform pan I use to make cheesecake. It needs to bake in a water bath, but I didn't have a pan big enough to hold it and the water, too. Now I do.
We learned on the way out (but not while holding the door open; I wouldn't do that to anyone) that Sorelli's has live music many nights a week. I wonder if they'd like a Sinatra impersonator on Tuesdays or--yes, dear, you're right. I don't have time for such foolishness.
We returned home and watched our new selection of television. Mary Ann said she wanted to watch "The Wedding Singer." She fell asleep first, and I did soon after. I can't say I care how the offensive main character's life turned out in the part of the movie I didn't see.
Sorelli's Pizza. Covington: 321 N. Columbia 985-327-5541. Pizza.
