These Things Endure



Blessing has a way of being passed on, like ripples in a pond. We call it many things: karma, luck, positive thinking, God's favor, as if God was up there bribing us with blessings to do what he wants us to do.

 

Say rather that God has created the universe out of love, patterned after love, and built upon love. Anything done out of love takes part in the nature of the universe because it imitates the God who created the universe. One who builds his life on the foundation of love and truth, establishes a house built upon rock. Upon that foundation blessings will be laid for many generations to come, even to the ending of time, because God sees that it is strong enough to hold them.

 

But this is no guarantee that bad things won't also happen, no matter how well you build. There will still be heartache, pain, sadness, loss, and death. Sometimes we ask why bad things can happen to good people. This is a silly thing to ask. One may as well ask why storms hit both the weak houses and the strong houses. The storms are coming, whether you build your house on sand or on rock. Build on rock, not because it will keep your house out of the storm, but so that when the storm comes, your house will have a fighting chance.

 

This picture was taken on November 11, 2011, shortly after I graduated the US Army Special Forces Qualification Course and received my green beret. It was the last time I ever saw my grandfather. I put almost 3 years of sweat and blood into earning that silly green hat. G'Pa put 74 years of his life into building a legacy of Faith, Family, Pizza and Beer. The green hat means nothing, if at the end of my life I do not leave behind me a legacy of love, like the one which this old, bald, toothless hero left behind him.

Ted Pelicano, May 27, 1937 - November 26, 2011

"But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Joshua 24:15

Christmas Hawaiian Pizza

This weekend I am visiting my cousins who live in Virginia, on my way north to NY for Christmas. Now, I always make pizza for them when I visit. I really love making pizza, but I seldom make it anymore. I never make it for myself. It is a lot of work, even though I enjoy it, and it just doesn’t make sense to me to go through all that trouble without someone to share it with. I’d just as soon order out, even though it is nothing like the same quality.


At any rate, on Saturday morning I went to 0830 Mass, and I was still thinking about what kind of pizza I was going to make. I wanted to do something new and adventurous that I had never tried before. One of my cousins had suggested Hawaiian pizza, but I’ve never really liked the Hawaiian pizzas I have tried from dominos and Papa Johns. I knew I was going to make a veggie-sausage stir fry pizza, and a deep dish, and I was thinking I wanted to redo a bruschetta pizza I had made once before, but for the fourth pizza I still had no ideas.

Then out of the heavens came an inspiration from the patron saint of pizza. There was a beam of light, and choral soprano chords going on, and it hit me: Christmas Hawaiian pizza! There was skepticism when I explained the idea, but it was an inspiration and I was not to be deterred. As it turned out I was vindicated by the results. The pizza was delicious, voted awesome by all partakers. It was probably Grandpa who gave me the idea. And now I am going to share it all with you, gratis.

First I made the dough. It was just a typical unspiced pizza dough, except that I added a couple of teaspoons of honey with the yeast as an activator, and I put in a little extra yeast. The result was a fluffy, smooth, gorgeous dough that I half spread before letting it rise so that when it rose it covered almost half the pan, lessening the work I needed to do to spread the dough. The magic in this pizza was mostly in the toppings.

After spreading the dough I topped it with a generous layer of red sauce. I used cheese flavored spaghetti sauce, not pizza sauce. I think spaghetti sauce has a better texture to it than most off the shelf pizza sauces. On top of that I sprinkled almost a whole can of pineapple tidbits (I actually did not sprinkle them personally. A friend of mine did the sprinkling.) After that I added the ham. I bought a slice of boneless ham, ready to eat, cured in salt. About half of it went into the deep dish pizza, but the other half I prepped for this Christmas Hawaiian pizza. I diced it up really small, less than quarter inch cubes, and put it in a small bowl. On top of it I poured a generous spoonful of cinnamon, and about the same amount of powdered cloves, and then a few ounces of warmed honey. I stirred them all up together until the ham was thoroughly coated and then spread that on the pizza. After that a generous layer of mozzarella and baked at 475 for twenty minutes.

Bon Appetit.