End of the Summer at Angelo's

This evening we went out for pizza as a last fling before school starts tomorrow. We're now well acquainted with Angelo's, which offers coal-fired oven pizza and pasta. It's very convenient and looks like it will be a reliable staple of of our pizza repertoire. A favorite of ours since our first visit has been the mozzarella cheese pizza, which is simple but always very pleasing, with fresh basil leaves scattered on top and thin crust just as I prefer.

On tonight's version, though, the basil was nowhere to be found. It was still good, but I am a big fan of the fresh basil. On the other hand, little J (with whom I usually share the pizza) always has to pick off the basil leaves, and so he enjoyed it more than usual. I don't know whether they just forgot or if basil was scarce over the long holiday weekend. Hopefully this is not some consequence of the end of the domestic basil growing season, which I think is limited to the hot weather months. I'm all for sourcing food locally, but where my thin-crust pizza is concerned I have no qualms about flying fresh basil in from whatever far corner of the earth happens to be in the midst of basil season. After all, I gave up my car to move to New York so I figure I am within my carbon budget to indulge in year-round fresh basil.