I had no idea how wonderful pizza would taste when coming from our very own SPEA-class built cob oven in the GANG garden! I mean, I don’t even like pizza!

On the one day that it wasn’t raining or threatening to rain, we gathered for our first ever cob pizza party. It was supposed to be a reward for that SPEA class, which, on a drizzly day in November, 2010 had stomped and shaped the oven into being from sand, clay and straw.

But only one student from the class showed up! I guess we were too close to the end of the semester, plus it was Easter Weekend. But there were still about a dozen of us.

However, that one student brought a student friend, and a couple students from across the street and next door showed up, plus the teacher Melissa and her husband and children. And Colin, who built the structure for the oven and finished the oven, and Nathan, who spearheaded the project. Here’s Nathan, taking a good look at what he hath wrought.

We will next fire up the oven on June 25, for our Solstice Party and Celebration after our Children’s Workshop: “Inviting the Little People In.”

Meanwhile, we’re realizing that we’ve just got to make some cob benches down there by that oven. And meanwhile, I’m dreaming of outdoor cob ovens on every block in town in the future. A mighty handy fallback when the electricity shuts off.

When we finished the pizzas,

several of us threw potatoes and and eggplant in the oven. We could have put in some bread to bake, and who knows what else. The oven stays hot for a long, long time.

I now recognize this cob oven as an incredibly powerful magnetic center for the neighborhood commons that we are cultivating via the GANG.

May Melissa and Chris’s beautiful boy Emmett live to grow up into a world transformed into into community by the intention and effort of his parents’ generation.