Make Your Own Non-’Meh’ Pizza

Have you heard? Pizza, the food item, was on The New York Times Magazine’s “Meh List” this weekend. It prompted enough “excuse me, what” reactions that Willy Staley took to The 6th Floor blog to defend the meh designation:

Consider the criteria at work here. What’s a food inoffensive to even the most unsophisticated palates? A food that comes in massive quantities because its ingredients are humble? A food that is easily divided into equal parts, satisfying children’s obsession with fairness? A solution starts to form in your mind.

And then, like so many T-ball coaches before you, you pull into a strip-mall parking lot and find a spot in front of the local Chuck E. Cheese. There, you will feed a massive group of picky children under the hiss and whir of a grotesque animatronic rock band, and it will be fine. Pizza is right at home here in a suburban strip mall because pizza, like a strip mall, is fundamentally meh — good, but rarely great; fine, but seldom bad.

Pizza is my go-to cheap eats because ingredients are relatively cheap, and it can actually be very delicious!

So here is a pizza I made recently for around $5:

The dough was a pre-made one I bought at the store for $3 and then cut in half because I was only feeding myself (plus, you know there is more pizza in your future after you refrigerate or freeze the remaining dough).

Other ingredients: sliced cremini mushrooms, thin slices of red onion, and smoked mozzarella, plus dashes of oregano finished with pepper and flakes of Maldon sea salt. It was a white pizza, which meant no sauce — just olive oil. And it was delicious!

So pizza can certainly be “meh” but it doesn’t have to be.

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