Sorry, Ladies. It’s Pizza Night. No Greens!

Shôn Ellerton, October 30, 2025
My unhinged rant on how women tend to sabotage a perfectly good pizza, barbecue, or spaghetti and meatballs night!

Eat healthily!

Make sure you get all your As, Bs, Cs and Ds!

Got to have plenty of vegetables!

Don’t eat too much meat!

I’ve heard them all before and, no doubt, so have you.

Personally, I enjoy cooking, and I probably do the lion’s share in my household. I also cook healthy food and come up with a wide variety of cultural styles. From Indian to Italian. From French to Japanese. From German to good ‘ole fashioned traditional British cooking. Moreover, I ensure that, as a family, we all eat at the table and eat at a reasonably early time. And no, kids don’t have a so-called ‘special’ menu because they may not like what everyone else is getting. In general, kids need to have less choice these days.

But why this whimsical tirade? What am I talking about?

I’m talking about pizza night! Or barbecue night! Or spaghetti and meatballs night!

There is a time and place for everything, but when it comes to pizza night, that is what it is. Pizza! And not those hoity toity up-your-nose gourmet pizzas, some of which are truly horrible in my opinion. Who in their right frame of mind would smother a perfectly good pizza with lamb and garlic sauce or embellish it with prawns, oysters, or other bits of seafood?

I am a traditional red meat pizza lover, and that means mainly pepperoni, sausage, ham, and ground beef. And, oh yes, no chicken. If one must have veggies on their pizza, the odd mushroom or bell pepper here or there won’t go amiss. I love onions, but not on pizzas. The texture’s all wrong.

And if people ask me whether I want a tomato or barbecue base for the sauce, I look them incredulously in the eye and firmly state that pizza was never meant for barbecue sauce. Never!

The only slightly odd items which I might find acceptable are pineapple and anchovies but only in the right combination. After all, these ingredients have been with pizzas since time immemorial, so someone obviously got this right.

Vegetarian pizzas are, by and large, truly atrocious, except for just cheese.

Why?

Because vegetables always shed too much water into the pizza thus turning it into a wet insipid rag rather than that divine combination of delicious stringy cheese, caramelised pepperoni and a nice crispy base.

I’ve given this article a somewhat sexist title because I’m on full licence to make any generalisation I may well want to make.

“Sorry, ladies. It’s pizza night. No greens!”

Catchy title, is it not? Like most clickbait these days, it got you here as a reader, didn’t it?

Well, here’s my absurd reasoning behind this all.

Most women hamper pizza and barbecue nights.

But how?

They try to make eating pizza or devouring great hunks of meat into an act of civility.

Here’s an example.

My dad and I used to order pizza to be delivered to the house from time to time. It’s a special occasion. Well, his partner, she always cooked very healthily. Brussels sprouts, mushrooms, salmon, green beans, and, you know, stuff like that which gives you all the As, the Bs, the Cs, and so on.

As soon as the pizza arrives, the delivery boy takes the pizza boxes out from the red padded container still steaming away and simply smelling divine.

I bring them immediately to the table along with a roll of paper towels. My dad and I open the boxes and, just as we start to pick up a piece, my stepmother would tell us to wait while she got the plates and cutlery out.

Plates and cutlery?

We want to be slobs and eat this pizza while it’s still stringy and hot!

But that’s not all.

She then says to wait until she makes some greens.

Greens?!

She’d take out a head of lettuce from the fridge followed by an assortment of other salad-like things including radishes, cucumbers, onions, and cherry tomatoes. And then she’d start meticulously putting together this salad, which, if she had done in advance before the pizza arrived, we wouldn’t need to stare and salivate at the already cooling off pizza.

On vegetables.

I don’t like salad. Never did. Never will.

In many ways, I question if salad was even ever meant to be eaten by humans at all. Who came up with this idea? Desperation?

The problem is this. I don’t like salad dressings. Ranch sauce, 1000 Island Dressing, mayonnaise, vinegar, and other horrible condiments like tartar sauce and salad cream. Without dressing, you get a bland, insipid, watery, and frankly, unappealing concoction of rabbit food with often gag-inducing textures, an example of which include shaved carrots. Oddly, the only thing which I pick out and relish are the raw onions, which, funny enough, many people do not like.

I like strong flavours and there’s nothing wrong with beautifully cooked vegetables with appealing textures and wonderful tastes. For example, creamed spinach with melted butter and cream, or golden-fried mushrooms, tender buttered asparagus, Brussels sprouts which have been tossed around with olive oil along with a few pieces of charred bacon or a well-roasted breaded cauliflower, perhaps with some melted cheese.

As a child, I remember going to restaurants in the United States and being chided that I didn’t touch my salad with my main meal. And that is what American restaurants tend to do for the vegetable component. They throw in a pre-prepared side order of salad. And I, being particularly sensitive to the smell of chlorine, can taste this through and through in most salads. Where I grew up, mains water was quite heavily chlorinated.

So damn it! Leave the pizza alone and let’s have a day’s break from having greens.

We can expand my rant into the world of barbecues.

There are four purposes for having barbecues.

One. For the menfolk to gather around the barbecue, cook the meat, and talk crap.

Two. For the menfolk to serve all the meat into big dishes for everyone to pick out and eat on the spot.

Three. To eat great chunks of meat expecting to sweat out meat for at least a week.

Four. To be outside and be in the smoke.

As a kid, I always enjoyed this sense of freedom. I remember those days of picking up bits of chicken, a kebab, or simply a hamburger and eating it outside in the cold weather.

But when women get involved, it means going inside the house where plates, knives and forks have been set out. In the middle of the table would be the ceremonial salad once again reminding us that we’re not allowed to be barbarians.

I’m sorry. Having barbecues is a barbarian kind of activity. I mean. Both words start with ‘barb’, don’t they?

And finally, to the world of food which should never be mixed by anything else.

There are two that spring to mind.

Spaghetti and meatballs and Chinese dumplings.

Now and again, I make traditional spaghetti and meatballs, many of which today progressively and simply call pasta. OK. Technically pasta is the superset of all the known pasta varieties, but I like traditional spaghetti and meatballs. All those other shapes. Penne, farfalle, spirals, fettucine, linguine, elbows, and all those other shapes are a bastardised form of how not to make spaghetti.

I spend all day making the best damned spaghetti sauce and meatballs only to find out that when I proudly serve my creation at the dinner table, my mother-in-law would produce another dish completely out of character with eating spaghetti. For example, a Chinese vegetable dish with cabbage and mushrooms. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. The Chinese make some of the best damned vegetable dishes on the planet, but not with my Italian spaghetti and meatball dish!

And the same goes with Chinese dumplings as a main meal. However, an appetiser of dumplings is acceptable if followed by a main of something else.

Preparing, assembling and eating Chinese dumplings is one of the most socially binding of all experiences. It can take the best part of the day to make dumplings and when it’s time to eat them, it is an absolute gorge-fest of culinary delight.

It only takes one person to spoil it by insisting on bringing out another dish in total conflict with the enjoyment of eating dumplings. I remember a big fish dish being brought right in the middle of a dumpling feast. A complete fish with glistening eyes.

I do like fish now and again, but I like it in its pure form. Simple steamed barramundi with a sprinkling of spring onion. A lightly grilled red snapper. A delicately steamed flounder or Dover sole. But fish should never be served with a bunch of other stuff, especially strong-flavoured food. It’s just unappealing and utterly wasted on me.

So, that’s it.

My preposterous rant on the sabotage, usually by women, on otherwise enjoyable pizza, barbecue, spaghetti, or dumpling nights.