By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Wonderful things can happen when you don’t allow yourself to be constrained by conventions. This isn’t some new observation. We hear things like this all the time about visionaries and geniuses – folks like Mohandas Gandhi and Nikola Tesla – who changed the world by approaching problems in a new way.
We use terms like “thinking outside the box” so regularly that they’ve become cliché. Meaningless. The drivel of middle management leadership training sessions and New Age self-help gurus.
But then someone comes along with a completely new spin on something you thought you knew, and you’re reminded how wonderful it can be when someone approaches something in a new way.
Take, for example, that favorite American comfort food – the pizza. We all know what pizza is. It is, itself, an outsider’s spin on a traditional food; more American than Italian, at least as we know and love it.
It’s infinitely adaptable too. Everyone has their own favorite toppings, their favorite crust style, even their favorite sauce. Some folks do white sauces or garlic butters. I’ve even seen barbecue sauce pizzas. So, it wasn’t necessarily a huge stretch when Bob Patel at Hitchins Food Mart decided to try putting a curry sauce and spicy chicken on a pizza. But it’s the kind of thing that most of us wouldn’t have thought of, simply because we have this conventional notion of what a pizza is. Bob stepped outside those conventions, and the result is absolutely delicious.
He gave me a sample a couple of weeks ago, when he was working on the recipe. I had come in for one of his chicken curries with rice and fried flatbread. (The flatbread is another example of Patel’s culinary innovation. That chewy, crispy, delicious bit of fried bread starts life as a simple flour tortilla.) He brought out a slice from one of the personal sized pizzas along with my curry and I was blown away. It was amazing, with the perfect ratio of fluffy crust to curry sauce. The heat of the chicken was still there, but it was tamed by the abundant cheese, and everything worked perfect together. Even the green peppers and red onions, two toppings I wouldn’t normally order on my pizza, were perfect on this combination of flavors. I told Bob I wouldn’t change a thing about it, and would order it exactly as is if he put it on the menu.
He did. And I did. But I messed up. I’d never ordered a pizza from Hitchins Post before either. So, I didn’t know they made full-size pizzas. I made the assumption when ordering for myself and two friends that we would be getting personal-sized pizzas. Instead, I showed up to three pizzas, one of which was enough to feed all three of us. I’m not complaining, though. Though my intent was to treat them to lunch, my friends insisted on paying for one of the three, and they took it home with them to share with family. I took the third pie, and I’m snacking on it as I write this. A delicious reminder that wonderful things can happen when you aren’t afraid to step out of line. And a much tastier way of reinforcing the concept than any training program.
Jeremy D. Wells can be reached at editor@cartercountytimes.com
