Goodbye fromage, my old friend

JR, alas, I'm not from New Orleans, so I don't know that place. I count that as my loss.

Homemade pizza isn't as crisp, of course, unless you've got a brick oven in your house. But it's still better than the chain-store stuff.

A pizza stone preheated at 450 pretty much does the trick. At least it's always worked for us.

And my vote for best pizza is split between Steve's in Austin, MN [classic handtossed thin crust] and a little hole in the wall at Sixth and 44th in Manhattan [this was twenty years ago, and I may be a bit fuzzy on the address], with Pizza World in Madras, India a close third [after a week of questionably ripe mangos, curry, rice, and curd, a garlic, tomato, and pineapple, thin crust with no cheese, is food of the gods.] I do suggest you steer clear of Pizza 9900, in O-Jung Dong in Daejon, South Korea, however. First and only place I've ever seen put kiwifruit on a Hawaiian. The same neighborhood was also home to a place called Donkey Fried Chicken. Not too tempting [the name comes from dong-ka su, which is essentially chicken-fried pork chops].

Hmmm. Honest question here--what is the EOdoxy philosophy regarding soy products that (arguably) taste like meat and dairy, and perhaps more importantly, look like meat and dairy? Are Eastern Christians permitted to chow down on veggie burgers topped with soycheese with soy ice cream for dessert?

I could see it both ways--tofu after all was made widely available in the West first as a Kosher work-around, and yet...I actually remember a debate between rabbis over whether the the matter replicators used for meals in the Star Trek franchise would be kosher if used to "make" a cheeseburger. The one sage argued that even if it wasn't actually from a living animal, the point was that the appearance of eating unclean foods would be a cause for scandal, as defined in Jewish terms. Do the Eastern churches take a similar tack?

Perhaps the Christian need not be so concerned with giving scandal vis-a-vis food consumption (every time Rod goes all foodie on us and linking it with spirituality I have to remember what exactly Jesus said it is that defiles a man), but still...what if food processing technology improves to the point where soy substitutes get to be indistinguishable from the real thing? What would be the point of the fasting regulations then? It recalls my mother's account of how she privately dropped the Catholic teaching on Friday abstinence just about a year or two before the hierarchy did--because her boyfriend of the time was treating her those nights to swordfish steaks at a certain restaurant that were so good that she realized it was simply no longer any sort of sacrifice.