Who wants pizza?

 

Seems like everyone and their cousin Luigi is buying a pizza oven these days. It's the must-have backyard accessory, next to those spring loaded hoses for people like me who are too lazy to spool up the hose after watering my squirrel-nibbled tomatoes.

I'm not buying a pizza oven. Particularly not the Ooni-Karu 16, with a price tag well over $800.

Not because I don't love pizza, I do. I grew up in Queens,NY where prior to Starbucks, there was a pizzeria, sometimes two on every block. At the time, and we don't have to get into the year, you could buy a slice for 50 cents and Coke for another quarter. In other words, lunch would be a buck and a quarter. 

It's hard to believe that in those days school would let out at noon and hundreds of kids, ages 8-12 would be freed upon the mean streets of Flushing to cross Kissena Blvd and roam about the neighborhood without any supervision.

Today's helicopter parents put Nest cameras in kids bathrooms to monitor their proper stool manufacturing.

But getting back to the premise, I love pizza but pizza doesn't return the favor. Those calorie laden slices require hours and hours on the Peloton. So, at most, we order from local pizza shops -- I would never call them pizzerias, that's reserved for purveyors East of the Hudson -- maybe once a month.

The damage is always about $20 a pop. That includes tax and tip. And there's usually another breakfast to be had from the leftovers.

So, at twenty bucks a pop and at a rate of once a month, I might spend $250 a year on pizza. The number is actually closer to $100 a year, because we've recently been seduced by Dave's Hot Chicken.

If I were to purchase the pizza oven, I'd be spending $800+ for the rig, plus ingredients, plus one of those white floppy chef's hats (a must) and would be shelling out more than a grand. For pizza.

My pizza oven investment would not break even for another 10 years. With the current rate of our national political disintegration, I'm not sure this country is going to be here in 10 years.

Also, and this is just my slow metabolism talking, isn't the whole rationale for eating pizza centered around the notion of being just too damn lazy to defrost, marinate and cook a chicken or a fatty flank steak? Why do I want to stand next to a 900 degree blast furnace when I could throw twenty bucks at a kid to drive my dinner right to my front doorstep?

My hope is that my wife does not read this post and apply its strained logic and sensical math to my 2015 Audi S5 and its exorbitant monthly payments, considering how rarely it gets out of my driveway.

"You never leave the house and even drive that damn thing."