My Food Fantasy

O.K., I’ve shared with Frequent Readers of This Blog (FROTB) a food confession, I introduced you to the Meat Monkey, and I’ve gone on and on about the Land Lobster. Now it’s time to take this one step further: I want to share a Food Fantasy.

And no, my food fantasy does not have to do with celebrity wonder chef Giada De Laurentiis and tomato sauce.

(No, you see, my fantasy about Giada goes like this. She makes me one of her special gourmet breakfasts, and serves it to me in bed. And because my hands are bandaged from some sort of non-lethal accident, she has to feed me the breakfast. And then afterwards, again because my hands are bandaged, she—wait! Whoa. Sorry about that—I started to get a little carried away!)

My food fantasy is this: I want to have in my backyard one of those big old wood-burning pizza/bread ovens. Then I could make really cool wood-fired pizzas and roasted veggies and awesome breads, and invite all my cool friends over and have great backyard parties drinking awesome Napa Valley or Sonoma County wine and playing bocce ball and so on and so on. Wouldn’t that be cool? You know, crank up the oven to 900 degrees or so and just go at it.

Here’s what I want:


Here’s what I have:


I even have the perfect spot in my backyard. You see, we had this old gazebo which began to rot away. So I knocked the darn thing down! All I need to do is knock out the deck and presto!—wood-fire oven spot.

Gazebo, eight minutes later (well, maybe 10-12 minutes later):

So what do you think? The ovens only cost about $5-$8K… plus delivery… and custom installation… and of course the cooking classes… and you need a couple-three cords of wood. I mean, that’s not a lot, is it?

Let me know what you think.

And stay tuned for my next post, when I talk about the wood-fire oven class I recently attended put on by Andrea Mugaini whose company re-established wood-fired ovens in the U.S.