Welcome to Lili's Half Moon Pizzeria

Let's be blunt. Pizza in Canada is as bad as poutine must be in Italy. No, wait, if they knew what it was and could fathom why people might eat it, I'd bet poutine in Naples would be fabulous. In Canada, it's common for pie-makers to do the counterintuitive: putting the toppings on the bottom. We'll, not the bottom, but below the cheese. Listen you iconoclasts sans clue, those ingredients are not called toppings by accident. The pizza purveyors here should call their toppings bottomings not only because thaty are usually positioned that way, but that's what they taste like.
Also, never ever forget that Boston Pizza is neither Boston... nor pizza. The difference between pizza from the chains and real, good pizza is similar to the difference between flattened gum off the street and a fresh stick of Black Jack.

Below comes from a Pizza 73 menu, typical of western CA chains. You might also be struck by how expensive it is.

Meat Supreme Pizza pepperoni, salami, Italian sausage, ground beef and bacon

$17.50

$24.50

$29.95

If you've never had pizza pie in Italy or a North American city that has an Italian neighborhood, your bucket list is not complete. New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston all have dozens of pizzerias worth writing home about. If you're an aficionado of deep-dish, add Chicago to the list.  A little closer to Cortes there's a great one in Victoria called Prima Strada. Seattle has Serious Pie, among others. But there's a new contender for pie supremacy on the block and it's right here on Cortes Island. Welcome to the Lili's Half Moon Pizzeria. Problem is, you'll never get a table.
We have craved pizza for a very long time. Tonight we decided to answer that call. Victoria is hours and boat rides away, so we decided to gather some information* and try our luck right here, the garden spot of Desolation Sound. You, my friend, should have been here; but of course you couldn't.
We fired up the wood stove - that's right, the woodstove. There's a grate in the backyard that we figure wolves used to grill their venison in simpler times. It went in the stove over the mostly-smoldering wood. Our old pizza stone was rescued from semi-retirement and rested on the grate. The stove made them very, very, very hot. In fact, the stone was shortly ablaze. Lili couldn't have been more gleeful. Residue of bad home-made pizza, about 10 years' worth, was incinerated like so many Spanish heretics. If asbestos and the resultant mesothelioma weren't a brand new revenue source for sticky lawyers, we might have wrapped ourselves in it.
Lili found a pizza dough recipe, more an homage to pizza-process and technique, on the webernet and whipped up a ball. It had to cure in the fridge in hunks about the size of  Kaiser rolls, something neither of us would have considered. I made the sauce and created the cheese, meat, veggie and herb and herb proportions. Skip the Italicized - get it? Italicized? - stuff if you're not interested in recipes.
The sauce: more or less equal amounts of dried oregano, dried basil, dried thyme, chopped garlic and crushed anise seeds infused into EVO in a sauce pan. Low heat, 10 minutes or until the garlic softens. A can of organic tomato sauce is introduced - "Helloooo pan" - and stirred thoroughly. Increase heat to medium. Cut up a few whole canned plum tomatoes and add juice and all to increase acidity. Simmer for a while.
Cheese mixture" Shredded Buffalo Mozzerella, Parmagiano Regiano, Pecorino Romano in about 4-2-1 ratio. Dios mio, keep the cheddar in the cheese drawer.
Meats: Genoa Salami, Prociutto or her illegitimate cousin Wesphalian Ham and some fresh chopped-parsley for a finishing garnish.
After curing the dough, Lili rolled it out into oblong-shapes, thin, with turned-up edges. I would have said rink-shaped until last week before Mitch set me straight on what a rink is.
I'm not going to bore you with the dusting process and the transfer process. Suffice it to say that there was a layer of flour on the floor that would have presented a danger to those less-surefooted than Lili and I. The dough received a quick dose of EVO, sauce, the cheese mix, roasted red peppers and Genoa salami. Into the stove it went and within 3 minutes it was done. Letting it cool was as fruitless an endeavor as it is at Regina's or Serious Pie. We each have that hanging roof o' mouth thread-o-flesh behind our front teeth that accompanies terrific pizza. And terrific it was.
Where did we get the name Lili's half Moon Pizzeria? We moved the pizza stone when it was really hot and probably should have waited for it to cool. Each half fits in the wood stove better now, anyway.

Tools of the trade shown in soft focus to emphasize how dreamy the pie was

Useless bits of information that might amuse
         - Buffalo Mozzarella comes from the milk of water buffalo in Italy, bison here in Canada
         - A lot of acidity (chopped plum tomatoes) in the sauce balances the inevitable caramelizing or charring of the bottom of the dough.
         - A sprinkling of cornmeal goes between the pizza and the cooking surface.
         - Cedar planks, usually associated with salmon, make excellent pie paddles
         - Researchers at the MicroNanophysics Research Laboratory at Monash University in Melbourne,   Victoria, Australia, have developed a model of pizza tossing based on observations of professional chefs tossing dough. 
I went to the wrong school.


*http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001199.html