Heller Family Traditions

There are 2 Heller Family Traditions that we are just not willing to give up-regardless of where we live in the world. One is "Friday Night Pizza" and the other is "Saturday Morning Oatmeal Buttermilk Pancakes." "Friday Night Pizza" was previously known as "Friday Night Pizza & a Movie," but the birth of our daughter and her immersion into a toddlerhood has nixed the movie festivities - unless we want to watch Elmo. Since 20 minutes of Elmo is all that we can take each day, the pizza is consumed at a "normal" dinner time and the movie is viewed only after Caitlin has gone to bed.

The pizza tradition materialized from my Catholic roots and dates back to the mid-1980's. My dear mother grew weary of stuffing unwanted fish sticks down the throats of her land-lubbing children on Friday night's during Lent(If interested in learning more about the origins of Lent, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent) and gave into the most universally beloved mainstream American cuisine - pizza. Ahhh yes...pizza.

In our lives, pizza equals love. Matt and I fell in love with a garlic coated, thin crusted, mushy-gushy, brick oven baked pizza at Fiorello's Cafe in West Chester, PA (my hometown) about 6 years ago. We savored every morsel of that pizza and throughout the years we have tweaked our dough and pizza sauce to reflect such a fond memory. Everyone in our family knows that Matt & Tara's pizza is simply THE BEST. And mostly everyone who knows us knows not to mess with Friday nights (I am such a creature of habit!).

I ceremoniously made one last pizza at our home in Raleigh for my mother, Caitlin and I (Matt was in Taiwan) before our bread machine, pots and pans were packed up by the moving company in mid-August. Mmmmm, it was good. (Sorry, this post is really hard for me to write without getting super hungry!) We were all ready to take on Taiwan and their Pizza Hut pizza until...

...we went food shopping. Let's start with the cost of a can of tomatoes. Apparently canned tomatoes aren't widely used here in Taiwan and the only ones that are available to us are direct imports from the US. Okay, no problem if you want to pay a few dollars PER CAN! These are not the giant Shop-Rite cans either, these are simple 14 ouncers. We are willing to bite the bullet on the tomatoes because I use them in so many different ways. At the risk of sounding somewhat obsessed, I am also willing to purchase fresh tomatoes, blanch them, peel them and freeze them, but I can't seem to find any local ones that aren't grown in a hot house. Hmmm...I wonder why? Taiwan has perfect conditions for growing tomatoes - even an extended period of warmth for more growing pleasure. (If you can't already tell, I love my tomatoes the way my nephew loves his vacuum's). Anyway so there's the tomato obstacle and I supposed you could consider it overcome now that I have a pantry full of canned maters from Costco. Let's move onto the cheese.

I think I've mentioned that dairy products aren't all that popular here either. While the Taiwanese put milk into cold tea, juices, shaved ice and a variety of other places that we Americans don't normally put it, they don't get into regular hard core consumption the way that we do. There are a few import stores here that sell most of the cheeses we're used to - IF YOU WANT TO PAY $10 FOR A 4 CUP BAG OF MOZZARELLA CHEESE!!!!

So, after a long week of jet lag and figuring things out we put our pizza making on hold and found Taiwan's most popular (and possibly the only) pizza joint called "Alleycats." Their pizza surely wasn't as good as ours, but it was wasn't bad either! Seriously, the fact that we even found a pizza place in Taiwan is nothing short of a miracle. God must have known that the absence of pizza would surely throw me over the edge. We were so hungry that we each got our own pie! The crust was fired in a brick oven so it had that thin crispiness that I just love! Since we were a two pie family this night, Matt got a pie full of meat while Caitlin and I shared some cheese. They served lots of beer, really good red wine (this could possibly be a new favorite...called Tall Horse from Australia) and a great salad with a tangy, Dijon-y balsamic vinaigrette. The food was great, but it was even better to get out on a Friday night in a hopping city and doing something we always do. I just love Fridays!!

So I mentioned that there were two Heller traditions...the second one is Matt's homemade oatmeal buttermilk pancakes. If you've ever had them, then you know that they are just a piece of Heaven on a Saturday morning! Regardless of what we would like or not like to spend on dairy products, buttermilk is nowhere to be found on this island. Luckily Matt is good at science and concocted something that resembles it and the pancakes were divine! It was a great start to the weekend!