1 Giuseppe: Anyway, Ishmael! Get to work!
2 Giuseppe: We have ten pizzas backed up for delivery already!
3 Ishmael: Wow, that’s a lot. How are you managing to make them all?
4 Giuseppe: I hired some new kitchen hands!
4 Martian 1: Hello, Earthling.

Recently I've starting making my own pizza dough. I've made pizzas for dinner a lot, but had always used store-bought pre-made pizza bases. Until I decided to try making my own dough last year. It's easy, and it's so much nicer than store-bought bases!

Here's a pizza I made last week - check out that dough:

The topping is tomato paste, dried basil and oregano, a "pizza blend" of cheese (mozzarella mostly, with a bit of cheddar and parmesan for flavour), butternut pumpkin, feta, and bunya nuts - the edible seeds of the bunya pine.

We have a bunya pine tree growing in my neighbourhood, a short walk from my place. The tall, dark green tree in the middle:

It was dropping its enormous cones throughout February and I collected over 3 kilograms of the nuts.

I still have most of them unshelled in the freezer, awaiting cooking and eating.

I've been using them in various dishes, but they're rich and filling, so you can't get through them very quickly. It's very cool to have a native food that you can collect from the wild (well, as wild as suburban Sydney gets) and use in your cooking. Australia doesn't have many native foods that are widely used. The only one readily available and widely known outside Australia is macadamia nuts. But recently more of these native Australian foods are becoming better known locally, and used in local cooking.