Dad’s Famous Bar Pizza

When I was a young boy of twenty two, my dad used to take me for ice cream. We’d walk down to the local Dairy Queen; I’d order an Orange Julius, he’d order a peanut butter Dilly Bar (his favorite) and I’d sit on his lap and we’d name the stars.

It was hard to do in the middle of the day, but we tried our best – all the stars in Ursa Minor were named Marcus Aurelius, and all the stars in Orion’s belt were also named Marcus Aurelius. We were never very good at naming stars. After ice cream, we’d come home and play Jenga. Dad would heat the bricks up in the bathtub so they were soft to the touch and burned my fingers. Times were simpler back then.

And then? My favorite part of the day. Dad would throw some cheese and pizza sauce on a tortilla, broil it, and make his “famous bar pizzas.” It was a treat, something between the two of us. Mom didn’t like pizza, anyway she didn’t have teeth and couldn’t eat hard food anyway so he’d make her one of her “milkshakes” and she would fall right to sleep.

My dad and I would stay up for hours, eating bar pizzas and watching movies he told me not to tell mom about.

Anyway, enough about me. Last week, I contacted my dad for his bar pizza recipe. We hadn’t talked in days or years, and I was craving one of his famous bar pizzas. The people who lives in his house hung up on me, but I wasn’t about to be deterred!

I admit, I had to make some substitutions on this recipe. Dad mostly spoke in soft groans and a language that I didn’t understand but still hurt my head, and most of the ingredients he listed were either poisonous in certain amounts, from another country that may or may not exist, or too expensive to find at your local grocery. Regardless, a little bit of tweaking and I’ve found that this recipe actually tastes very similar to dad’s!