Alexandra Stafford was heartbroken when she learned, at age 7, that her parents were getting divorced. Then her mom offered a consolation that instantly dried her tears: “When we move, we’ll have pizza every Friday.”
And so began a ritual that would cement a love for pizza that started in the Connecticut pizza parlors of her childhood, and has flourished through every life passage since.
Now living in upstate New York with her husband and four children, Stafford regularly hosts pizza nights at home — with doughs, toppings and matching salads she makes from scratch. Those recipes, techniques and the charming personal stories behind them are now a captivating book: “Pizza Night: Deliciously Doable Recipes for Pizza and Salad” (Potter, $30).
Stafford attended cooking school and worked in professional kitchens before launching her award-winning blog, Alexandra’s Kitchen, and writing a critically lauded cookbook, “Bread Toast Crumbs” (Potter, 2017). Her latest endeavor shows home cooks how they can create memorable gatherings with pizza throughout the year, with whatever skills or tools they have.
Instructions for four styles of dough — Sicilian, Detroit, grandma, and cast-iron skillet — and a handful of sauces and salad dressings provide the building blocks for 52 pizza recipes and their complementary salad mates, in chapters organized by season.
All are designed for mixing and matching, as I did with the two I made for my own pizza night — one topped with tomato sauce, fried eggplant and Parmesan; the other with roasted wild mushrooms, cream and fontina. Both called for Neapolitanish Pizza Dough, requiring a pizza peel I didn’t have. So I adapted them for sheet pans, using the simpler Pan Pizza Dough recipe for one and a store-bought dough for the other. Both won raves — as did the Spring Caesar Salad a la Speedy Romeo (inspired by a favorite family restaurant) I served with them. The One-Bowl Lemon-Ricotta Pound Cake in a small chapter with four other simple classic desserts made a perfect ending.
Pizza, salad and something sweet: What more do we need to turn an ordinary night into something special?
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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