This is really a story of two halves, you can skip the first part if in a hurry as the real meat of the story is all towards the end, but it helps to understand the background and set the scene. Although I've lived in various parts of the world over the years, I grew up in the west coast of scotland, where haute cuisine was rather thin on the ground and pretty much anything edible would be considered suitable for deep frying. A normal takeaway might include fish and chips, meat pie and chips, haggis and chips, pizza and chips (all deep fried of course). The choice of restaurants was unsurprisingly rather limited. For variety we might get curried chips from the chinese restaurant, but that would be about it. I may exaggerate slightly, but Scotland in the seventies (outside Glasgow and Edinburgh anyway) was not well served for gourmet food. So this was the sort of environment my family was used to. Ok, fast forward and I was living in California in the early nineties, fully adjusted to a somewhat different lifestyle and, with an infant daughter. My parents came to visit (proud grandparents, of course they would). One night they offered to babysit for us, so my wife and I could go out for a meal. Didn't need to ask twice, you couldn't see us for dust (colicky babies do that to you). We chose a moderately upmarket french restaurant, leaving my parents to take care of their own meal (daughter was easy as it was jars of slop at the time). Meal was nice, but not that memorable, although it was great to get an evening off, just the two of us. When we returned home, my mother had a face like thunder and proceeded to inform us of my fathers unforgivable mistake. They decided takeaway was in order and lack of transport meant it had to be within waking distance. No fish and chip shops, only vietnamese, thai, japanese, mexican, indian,.... All too confronting, so an all American pizza was in order - at least they knew what that was. And now we get to the crux of the story. The pizza place was only about 400 yards from our house, so off dad goes to order and bring home dinner. He watched them make a regular American pizza (no deep fryer in sight), plenty of toppings, bake it in the wood fired oven, slice it and box it up. When they handed it over, he tucks it under his arm and walks back to our house. During the short walk back, all the toppings slid off and accumulated in a heap at one edge of the box! Mum was most unimpressed!!!
