As an aside: I have never seen the movie ‘Oliver!’ so I’ve never heard the song I’ve appropriated as the title. I only know the song through my chum Matt, but a quick google search establishes that he was dead wrong when he sang the next line as “hotcakes and mustard”. Please continue to not put mustard on your pancakes, unless you are really looking to stretch your flavor experiences into a weird and unpleasant direction. Moving along.

I have come to rely on my recipe for little pizzas. The boy loves to eat them and loves to help make them, so it both nourishes him and keeps him busy for a bit. There’s no grand secret to the little pizzas, other than the pizza base itself: pitas. Specifically, the “greek-style” pitas that are sold at Costco (4 packs  for 7 bucks). You can get the pitas at your regular grocery store as well. Because they’re fairly thick, they can hold a goodly amount of toppings and sauce without collapsing. And, after 5 to 10 minutes of sitting on a baking sheet in a 400 °F oven, they are fully done. The variance in time is strictly crispiness level and cheese melt-a-tude.

As a warning: these little pizzas are not the venue for your bold and complicated pizza dreams. You won’t be cooking the pizzas long enough to cook any raw toppings, so keep it simple. Any meat that you use has to be fully cooked beforehand, like pepperoni or kielbasa. And remember that little grabby hands will be helping you dispense the pizza sauce (just use plain spaghetti sauce), stacking the toppings into a tower, and sprinkling cheese everywhere as they shove handfuls of the cheese into their mouths, so try to keep the chopping and cutting prep work to a minimum while they are in the kitchen with you.

Why does taking care of a kid with a cold sap your energy so thoroughly? When I  told Max that he might be too tired to go to Storybook and he agreed, I knew he was legitimately sick. Of course, the steady rivulet of snot and the coughing also gave it away. He was up since quarter to 6 this morning (as well as my poor wife who gets the early shift with the lad). My friend Roy let me in on the secret that kids sleep less when they’re sick, and it’s both reassuring and disheartening to see him proven right again and again.

Meeting Max’s needs today was actually a little easier than normal, with the cold subduing his natural rambunctiousness, but I still feel like Samson after a buzzcut. This is not to imply that I normally have epic strength or the ability to smite an army with the jawbone of an ass. I occasionally have the mouth of a jackass, but that’s not the same thing.

The other thing I have to keep in mind is that my immune system is a fan of bandwagon hopping, so my fatigue is probably my own cold rolling in quietly. Hopefully, the spicy sate beef soup from Ben Thanh will give me the vigor to return to robust health tomorrow.