On the morning of my mother’s birthday, I panicked. How could I have forgotten? Darn, darn, darn, I muttered to myself as I leapt out of bed and urgently scanned my room for a potential gift. I usually picked out her present weeks in advance, but this year I had been preoccupied with the excitement of the starting my freshmen year at a new boarding school. Amidst all the packing and preparations, her birthday simply slipped my mind.

Suddenly, a brilliant idea came to me. I would make her a birthday meal. I scrambled to find a recipe and after chancing upon an article about how to make pizza, I decided it would be the ideal option. It seemed simple enough and I already had most of the ingredients in my kitchen. I quickly printed out the recipe and began to assemble the ingredients.

The first thing I needed to do was make the dough. I gathered all the necessary ingredients: flour, water, olive oil, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and a bit of yeast. Mixing everything together in a big bowl, I pushed, pressed, slapped, punched, and poked at the dough until it was soft and malleable. Then, I flattened it into a disk and pinched the edges up into crusts. Satisfied with my handiwork, I placed it on a wooden board and moved onto the next step.

I encountered my first problem when I tried to find cheese. The recipe called for shredded mozzarella cheese, but after thoroughly searching my kitchen, the only cheese I found were the little sticks of string cheese my sister eats for snack time. Undeterred, I assembled four or five tubes of the cheese and a cheese grater and began shredding. However, the string cheese shredded much easier than mozzarella, and when I uncovered the cheese grater, there was a strange pile of small, yellow crumbs that resembled sprinkles, instead of the neatly shredded slices of cheese I expected to find.

My next dilemma was the sauce. When I chose the recipe, I could’ve sworn there was a half-filled jar of tomato sauce sitting in the pantry, but when I tried to locate it, the jar was nowhere to be found. I could not stop now, I thought. I had committed to this meal the minute I made the dough and obliterated the cheese sticks. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration came to me and I ran to get my flip flops. Trudging into my grandmother’s vegetable garden, I peeked under a plant or two until I found her tomatoes. The five fist-sized, bright green lumps sat in a powwow under a large leaf. I gathered them up and headed back inside.

After finding another recipe explaining how to make tomato sauce online, I tried to follow the directions. The recipe called for me to boil the tomatoes, but my family had forbidden me to use any pots or pans. The last time I used a pan, I had burnt it black while trying to make an omelet. Improvising once again, I placed the tomatoes in a plastic bowl half-filled with water and heated them in the microwave for a few minutes. Upon taking them out, I immediately dumped them in another bowl of ice cold water. The recipe claimed that this process should allow for the skins to slide off easily. It worked for the most part. I took the naked tomatoes, quartered them, cut off their spines and bruises, and removed all seeds. The last step was to cook the tomatoes for a few hours. Since I refused to waste a few hours cooking naked tomatoes, I chopped and wacked them with a knife for a few minutes instead and heated them again in the microwave. I decided that my end result could pass for tomato sauce and moved on to the next step.

Finally, it was time to prepare the toppings. The recipe listed mushrooms, bell peppers, onions, and possibly some types of meat. My refrigerator had only bell pepper and meat, but the meat was in the form of animal shaped chicken nuggets, microwaveable buffalo chicken wings, and a raw slab of fish. I decided to skip the meat.

The only step I managed to do well in the recipe was chopping the bell peppers. After it was neatly sliced into thin strips, I began to place toppings on the empty dough. First, I poured all the tomato sauce and spread it out until it reached the crust edges. Then I scattered my little cheese sprinkles on top of the sauce. Finally, I artfully arranged the green bell peppers over the pizza to hide the spots that the cheese missed. After wiping my hands and dusting down my apron, I looked down at the pizza I had created and felt a mother’s pride. It didn’t look so shabby after all.

With only fifteen minutes before my mother returned from work, I quickly placed the pizza in the oven and turned on the heat. I could barely contain my excitement when I heard the garage door open. I sincerely hoped that she would love it. The ding of the oven accompanied her footsteps up the stairs from the basement. I rushed to the kitchen, pulled on a pair of mitts, and took the pizza out of the oven, excited to see how it had turned out. What I saw caused me to cringe. The dough had risen over an inch and a ring of empty dough had formed between the crust and the rest of the toppings. The toppings formed a small island in the middle of the pizza and the bell peppers, my pride and joy, had shrunken into small, shriveled forms.

At that moment, my mother burst through the dining room. She saw me holding the disgusting pizza, and her eyes lit up. “Did you make that for me?” she asked delightedly. I nodded dismally. I explained miserably how I had wanted to make her a special birthday meal, but had been missing the right type of cheese so I had to use my sister’s, and how I couldn’t find any tomato sauce so I had to pick them from the garden, boil them, and crush them into paste, and how the only things I got right were the dough and the bell peppers, but the dough had risen much too high and the bell peppers had shriveled up in the oven…

She stopped me mid-sentence. “I love it,” she said. I felt a little flutter of warmth in my chest at those words, but looked at her doubtfully. She took the plate from me and took a huge bite. She then proceeded to eat through almost half the pizza as I stood agape beside her. “I love it,” she repeated and engulfed me in a warm hug. I marveled at how much she must love me in order to eat that ghastly pizza and never felt more loved than in that moment.