Chris and I took the day off from work today and rented a Zipcar to do a day trip to Connecticut. Since we used a Zipcar twice during the summer for some day trips, I suppose Zipcar wanted our business back, so they offered Chris a $50 voucher to use through the middle of this month, so we decided to take advantage of it. While we are in the first week of November, the autumn leaves were intense and gorgeous along many of the roads and highways that we drove through. I just love this part about living in the Northeast; you don’t get these colors out in California for sure. I still remember always seeing fall leaves on TV shows and movies growing up and always wondering, “How come we don’t see that here in San Francisco?”

We did a mini food tour of the New Haven Little Italy area today by going to three different New Haven style pizza spots: Sally’s, Pepe’s Pizzeria, and Modern Apizza. Until about 10 years ago, I actually had no idea that New Haven was famous for pizza. “New Haven style pizza” is also known as “apizza,” which the New Haven take on coal-oven fired, thin crust Neopolitan pizza. The name “apizza” comes from the accent of the immigrants who settled in this area from Italy. While I loved all four of the pizzas we got (from Pepe’s, we got two different types!), my absolute favorite was definitely the Pepe’s white clam pizza. While I’ve definitely had white pizza and clam pizza before, I’d never had a white clam pizza that was THIS FRESH. The clams were insanely fresh; they just screamed of the ocean with their seafood-y flavor and their saltiness. And the white pizza base was just perfect – just a little cheesy, very garlicky, and a lovely, crunchy, charred flavor.

My cousin loves this pizza and told me that we could actually get the pizza delivered to New York City via Goldbelly. Honestly, that’s not a bad idea…