"Piazza Pizza" w/ Jo Piazza

Published Jul 2, 2024, 8:00 AM

Hello, Puzzlers! AJ has a new book out! You can order "The Year of Living Constitutionally" right now!.

Puzzling with us today: author of The Sicilian Inheritance and host of "Under the Influence," Jo Piazza!

Join host A.J. Jacobs and his guests as they puzzle–and laugh–their way through new spins on old favorites, like anagrams and palindromes, as well as quirky originals such as “Ask Chat GPT” and audio rebuses.

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"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas. 

Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.

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Hello Puzzlers, and welcome to the Puzzler Podcast The Keystone in the Arch in your Roman Puzzle Equeduct. I'm aj Jacobs and I am here today with our awesome guest, the Great Joe Piazza. She's a journalist author and her new novel is called The Sicilian Inheritance. Welcome Joe, Hello, thanks for having me. We are delighted to have you. And you had mentioned in a previous podcast that your novel contains lots of descriptions of delicious food.

It sure does. I mean I set out when I wrote The Sicilian Inheritance. My goal was I'm I'm going to write the most delicious novel that's out there, Like I'm just gonna You're gonna read it, and you're gonna be so hungry you're gonna bucket trip to Sicily.

Well, I feel that is very appropriate. It's a good segue because this is a food related puzzle, and it was inspired because you may have noticed someone may have pointed this out. You may have noticed it that if you take the word pizza and add an A in the middle, you get your last name.

Oh you sure do? You sure do. In fact, people have been saying that to me. As long as you know, it was age appropriate for people to know what pizza was. I mean, so pretty much preschool I have been called Joe Pizza.

And I imagine by now you're you own it, you're good with it, or you sick of it? What's your what's your take?

Well, you know, I mean, if pizza weren't so wonderful, I'd probably be sick of it. But like I love a pizza. Who doesn't love a pizza? You know, it was it was rough in middle school, okay, and I had I had bad acne, and so there was a lot of Joe Pizza face happening.

That's not right, that's.

It's not right. It's not right. But you know, as children of the eighties and nineties, that's what we endured.

Yeah, we did well. I think kids, I've said it before on this podcast. Kids are just the worst. They just have no morals. But I am delighted that you are once again a fan of pizza, because, as you say, it's it's an amazing food. And this puzzle is based on the fact that we take a food and add a letter and get another word. So, for instance, if the clue had been an Italian dish of tomato and mozzarella cooked by the author of the Sicilian inheritance. That would be pizza piazza. So they are all gonna be that format.

Great, but also also pizza pie. What what would pizza piazza be like? Now, I want to create my own pizza.

Oh, I would love it. You know, we should hook you up with Dan Pashman who's been on the show, who has a He created his own pasta.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, Dan and I should get together totally.

All right, these are not all Italian foods though, just to just to be.

Sae, It's okay, It's okay, Bran I branch out.

All right, good for you. All right, here we go. All right. This is if there's a yellow fruit that's wearing a colorful handkerchief that might.

Be a banana bandana.

That is exactly what it would be perfect as long as as long as you spell it the American way with a NA instead of a NNA the British way. That is something I learned from Google. All right, how about what if there's a mollusk that files and something with an insurance company asking to be paid for an accident? That might be.

A interesting interesting What are my favorite molluscs. We actually just got back from the fish shop and got some muscles. But I don't think it's muscles.

It is not muscles, muscles, some muscles.

I'm gonna go with a clams.

Claim, nice clam claim. You got it? All right, that's impressive because I was already with the chowder. Hint. But you didn't need it.

No, no, oh, chowder sounds nice to You're making me hungry. It's almost dinner.

Time, all right, Well, here's some more food. All right. So this is the glazed meat main course at a at Christmas dinner. But if someone injures it, that might be.

This is a glazed meat. We are not We are not big glazed glazed meat eaters. What would you blaze? You would glaze You don't glaze a turkey? Oh you glaze a ham a hand. So if you're gonna hurt, oh is it ham harm?

It is ham harm? That's exactly hard.

Oh that sounds like something mean you do to a pig.

Oh I know, well I'm Jewish, so I didn't. I got nervous. I'm like, don't they have Christmas ham?

Is?

That's not something I hope it is.

No.

I think there's Christmas, Christmas turkey and Christmas ham. Yeah, yeah, all right, well maybe someone can fact all right, couple more. Oh well, let's stick with the let's stick with the meat. And we have a slice of breakfast meat that has its own light to guide it. That might be a.

Ah oh, a slice of breakfast meat. A slice and it's not I went to sausage, but I don't think it's sausage.

Nope, it's the other classic break other classics.

So I'm gonna go with bacon.

It's a good thing to go with because it's right.

Bacon, good, good bacon. But it's got a beacon.

That's a bacon beacon, a bacon beacon. That's exactly all right. Okay, if you're if you need to guide your bacon, of course you're gonna need a bike and bacon becon, Yeah you will, all right. And then the last we have a soft cheese. So if there's a soft cheese that becomes the obsession of a woman who's getting married, you could call her a you.

Know, I love cheese, aj it cheese is I mean pizza obviously, but I like pizza because of the cheese. So like I'm a big cheese aficionado, I'd love to be a cheesemonger in another life. So my favorite soft cheese is a nice, nice gooey Bree. And so I'm gonna say it's a bridebree.

You got it, or a bree bride fantastic. You cruised right through. You know your food, you know your letters, well done. What is the most delicious food that you described in the Sicilian Inheritance? Oh my gosh.

I mean it's really hard because what I did was I wrote the whole book without going to Sicily because I was writing it during the pandemic and I'd been years before, and I was doing everything from memory. And then after everything was written, I went and I had about three days before copy editing, and I ate everything in the book with my laptop in the restaurants, just typing and then asking other people, like stranger in the restaurant what their food tasted like and to describe it to me. And this one guy was eating a squid ink risotto with a lemon garlicky buttery lemon dressing, and he was like, it tastes like eating the ocean and I'm like, I'm putting it in the book, man, I am putting that right in the book.

That is very evocative. Nicely done. All right, I am sold. I love it. Well, thank you. You did great and you gave us some great imagery. So we are forever grateful. And we do have an extra credit and it's actually ocean related, so that was a nice segue here. It is. This is a long, loose garment that you might wear when eating fish eggs. If you're eating fish eggs, you might want to wear this garment. Okay, well, thank you again, and if listeners puzzlers, if you do have thirty seconds, please take a moment and rate the puzzler on your favorite podcast platform because it does make a huge difference in helping people find us and we would love for people to find us. And regardless, we'll meet you here tomorrow for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzlingly.

Hey, puzzlers, Greg Pliska here up from the Puzzle Lab with the extra credit answer from our previous episode, we played Cup of Joe with Joe Piazza.

Where every answer is to homophones. One is someone's name and the other is a word that sounds like that person's name. Your extra credit clue was this. These are the gadgets that would amplify the voice of a boxer with a cameo in the Hangover. Those are, of course, Mike's, Mike's. That's Mike Tyson, who appears briefly in that film. So we're here chatting on Mike's Mike's and hope that you're listening on the other end to the Puzzer Podcast.

The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs

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