Easy School Pizza

This Old School Cafeteria Pizza recipe captures the essence of all that was good in the school cafeterias of our youth. (Cafeteria ladies not included.)

This fall marked a real Mama Milestone for me. After 28 years of recording the first day of school with a photo each year, and then sending my girls off to preschool, and kindergarten, and grade school, and middle school, and finally high school – times five! – I faced my baby’s first day of Senior year – and my last “1st Day of School.”

All but the youngest have gone off to college now too, but as anyone who has ever done so will tell you, sending a child off to college is an entirely different experience from packing them off to first grade. Anyway, this rite of passage got me reminiscing, and as I got online to update Em’s lunch account, I got to thinking about the cafeteria and the school lunches of my childhood.

I grew up in Northeast Portland and attended the same elementary school from kindergarten through the eighth grade; and in that time, I figure I ate nearly 1500 meals in our basement cafeteria. More than two-thirds were “hot lunches.”

School Pizza