In Twin Falls, Idaho, not far from the train tracks, there’s a restaurant called Gertie’s Brick Oven Cookery.  They serve pasta dishes and salads and sandwiches, but the lion’s share of their custom is done in pizzas.

If you order the all-you-can-eat pizza at Gertie’s–which most do–you sit at your table while the waitstaff walk through the dining room offering a variety of pizzas.  These pizzas range from the mundane to the sublime, and the most sublime of all is the Idaho pizza.

I ate at Gertie’s at least a dozen times before I got up the courage to try the Idaho.  As you might imagine, if you’ve heard anything at all about Idaho, its namesake pizza is a potato pizza.  I kid you not, a potato pizza.  Even now my mind balks a little at the idea.

When I finally worked up the nerve to accept a piece of potato pizza from a bored teenaged waitress (who proffered it with a marked lack of enthusiasm), I had no idea I’d be getting a little slice of heaven, but that’s exactly what it was.

Aside from the crust, the Idaho pizza is not at all what usually comes to mind when you think “pizza.”  Instead of tomato sauce, the dough is spread thickly with ranch dressing before being topped with hash brown potatoes, chopped onions, crumbled bacon, and grated cheese.  It was love at first wary, tentative bite.

For years after moving to Sweden I craved that pizza, without it occurring to me that I could easily enough make it at home.  It was only after I described it to Olof a few months ago and he urged me to give it a go that I realized I could use one of my few, precious envelopes of Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing mix to bring a little bit of Idaho to the Far North.  I’ve made the pizza twice now, and both times it was every bit as good as I remembered.

And all of this is my roundabout way of asking if there’s anybody out there who wants to send me some ranch dressing mix.  Sweden is woefully behind the times where salad dressing is concerned.