Sunday Night Pizza Night
If you were expecting tips on how to eat healthy during this new year...well, sorry.
But this I can promise: some serious inspo.
My friend Lauren is a maker, baker, sock dealer, and empowering arts educator.
What I mean by that is she is an incredible artist (see: her website), a pizza chef (more on that soon), a sock seller (see: SOCK FAME), and an art teacher in Harlem (Ms. N's art class seems like only the best ever). Oh yeah... and she used to design things for big events likes the Emmy's, HBO's GIRLS, and a slew of other fancy NYC affairs.
Through it all, Lauren considers herself a homebody hustler and nothin' screams that more than making pizza from scratch every week. Friends: cleanse all you want this January, but I strongly suggest throwing on a little cheese & sauce into your Sunday nights. -emidobz
-
Fridays are for freedom. You go out (or for me, more often than not, you stay in and eat a burrito), and revel in the fact that you survived yet another workweek.
Saturdays are for productive freedom. The day you get to do you. The day you carpe diem (as the Brooklynites and/or Latin scholars like to say). The day where you wake up and treat yourself to a coffee and a high-caloric pastry because, dammit, you deserve it. You contemplate going to the gym, but you go to brunch instead. You travel to a new part of town, go to a baby shower, buy a magazine, eat cheese and watch Housewives, try to stay up to watch SNL – or go to bed early knowing that you’ll catch all the good clips on Facebook the next morning.
Then Sunday arrives. The day you start hearing your boss’ voice inside your head. You spend all day trying to not think about it, but surely, the time comes when it’s evening and you can no longer escape it. You begin reviewing the weekends to-do list that you completely forgot about, check your email and remind yourself of the meetings you have to prepare for, set your alarm clock, and eat your last supper.
I swear Sundays were devised by the bosses of the world simply to remind us that we are in fact not free, and that we still belong to them.
For years I went through the same process of accepting the dread and the misery that comes with Sunday night, until one weekend, I did what every psychologist and dietician would tell me not to do: I ignored all my feelings and went back to the cheese.
My approach to Sunday Night Pizza Night was simple; I needed something to look forward to on my night of fleeting freedom, and I wanted to bring my loved ones along with me. My boyfriend and I started making pizza every Sunday night about three years ago when we were gifted our very first pizza cookbook. After the first round of pies, I quickly realized that I simply ate all of my feelings of Sunday night and was too comatose to think about Monday. Ah, the solution. And just like that, Sunday Night Pizza Night (#SNPN) was born.
We love to obsess over new hobbies, and SNPN quickly became our addiction. Before we knew it, we were doing things like using not one, but two pizza stones in order to get the crust perfectly crisped, experimenting with different dough starters (essentially turning the dough-making process into a three day ordeal), and having ridiculous conversations like “the sweetness of the caramelized onions would help to cancel out the bitterness of the broccoli rabe.”
Now, every Sunday, instead of lamenting about our corporate chains, we turn into pizza foodies pretending to be on Chopped. Since moving in together (and bringing our respective pizza stones with us), we invite our friends up to Harlem for pizza like it’s a Sunday Scaries rescue shelter. They chill on the couch, sip some brew and munch on the apps provided on the credenza while also witnessing how we run a kitchen. I design the menu and prep all the food while he stretches the dough and cooks up the pies. We present each pie on our coffee table and savor the flavors. Each week we try to keep the pies personalized and seasonably relevant. Oh you’re from Philly? Cheesesteak pizza! Oh, you have trust issues with dairy? Vegan cheese! It’s fall? Roasted pumpkin with gruyere, mother*****! Each week we try to push the pie envelope to include new flavors and find different combinations. Everything is fair game.
So this Sunday, when you begin to have feelings of anxiety, or start to check your email, or go to set your alarm clock, I say reach for the cheese and PUT IT ON A PIZZA. -Lauren Nemchik
Follow weekly SNPN updates on instagram @SundayNightPizzaNight