How much pizza can I eat? Apparently, a lot. Rather than slice up the last few months of pizza eating into a whole bunch of individual posts, I’m stringing a bunch of them together into the blog equivalent of a whole pie. Bon appetit!

First, some entries for The Anthology of Pizza Box Graphic Design:

Kashi Frozen Pizza

A perfect example of bland big box health food marketing, with prominently displayed nutrition/diet information and a big, boring photo of the food you’re about to buy. But then, Kashi’s marketing has always annoyed me. Is there anything more smug than, “7 whole grains on a mission”? It’s convenience food, people. Not a commitment to world peace.

Box gets a failing grade. The pizza itself was just eh.

Enrico’s Brick Oven Pizza

We picked this one up in Sturbridge after a day of gawking at antiques.

Overall Design Assessment: The box is definitely more casual restaurant than vintage pizza joint. Disappointingly, it doesn’t feature a cartoon Italian stereotype OR a generic product claim. It does, however, possess several traditional pizza box design elements — namely, the wacky title font, green and red color scheme, and repeating brick pattern.

My favorite element, though, is the insecure use of Italian:

“Excellent Italian Insalatas (salads)”

Parentheses to the rescue!

Pizza Amore

Food with heart. And a pizza box design with a wall o’ text.

Overall Design Assessment: There’s not much to comment on here given the (almost) complete lack of graphics. The little heart is cute, though.

Generic Product Claims: Instead of a generic product claim, there’s an awesomely redundant one: “daily homemade fresh pita.”

And now, an announcement of sorts…

Along with the help of a hand-me-down pizza stone and an elderly electric oven, I have begun to experiment with homemade pizza. Behold: Baby’s first three pies.

Attempt #1: Frozen Dough

I avoided the mistake everyone makes (too much sauce) and embraced the one that involves scraping your pizza stone for 20 minutes (too much cheese). Edible, but not yet sublime.

Attempt #2: Homemade Dough

Black olives and onions were my favorite toppings as a kid, so it seemed like a good choice for this, my first truly homemade pie.

I got the recipe for the dough from Jaime Oliver, omitting the optional cornmeal flour (I didn’t have any). The dough wasn’t rising at first, but a few minutes of googling revealed the problem: a chilly kitchen. I ran the oven for a bit and it popped right up.

The crust came out surprisingly good, especially given the elderly oven’s random hot flashes.

Plus I was able to restrain myself with the cheese. Inch by inch…progress.

Attempt #3: Highbrow Pie

My best attempt by far. This pie has a blend of mild cheddar and mozzarella and a topping of heirloom cherry tomatoes. The homemade dough seems to fare well in the freezer, which is good news since I didn’t notice until after I dumped all the dry ingredients into a bowl that the dough recipe makes 8 DOUGH BALLS. Oops. Guess we’ll be eating pizza for a while.