Pizza Trend

I don't know how it happened, but one year, I made a s**tload of pizza. Ask Alex - I was making pizza a couple of times a week. It all started out with Aaron & Julie. I think I was over for dinner one night at their place and someone's aunt had given them a pizza cookbook, stone, and peel for Christmas. So they were trying it out. The pizza was pretty good, and I decided that I could probably pull it off. I had never made anything involving yeast before, but seriously - how hard could it be?

It turns out that I'm a pretty decent baker and that pizza is a very easy dough. I ended up wholeheartedly adopting Wolfgang Puck's recipe, which I will blog the next time I made pizza. It is very forgiving, relatively fast, and can be prepared without too much forethought. I'm tempted to try Peter Reinhart's recipe, but it has to rise overnight in the fridge, and well, that requires a little more planning than I'm currently capable of handling.

Anyhow, in that year or so of making pizza all the time, I got pretty good at making it how I like it. And then it was like I got over it and was making it maybe once a month. Somehow, since meeting Rich, I haven't made it at all. Hrm. That's not entirely true. I just never made my own crust. I'd have him pick up pizza dough from Trader Joe's or something. My dough is better, but nothing is faster than pre-made refrigerated dough, so really, my laziness prevailed.

I made pizza for the first time since dating Rich on Superbowl Sunday this year. We declined all invitations to view the Superbowl and stayed home. I started the dough and we went out for a three mile walk around the neighborhood We walked south along the creek to the edge of the big county park and then walked over to the pond where we discovered some domestic and Canadian geese as well as other water fowl. Rich was surprised to see a small flock of sea gulls, too. Drew didn't handle the whole walk so well. He got tired and pooped out especially in the last mile or so, as we were taking a little tour through some of the parks in the neighborhood.

After we made it back to the house, I started up the oven and put the pizza stone in and there we went. Since it was the first go in the new house, I made pretty simple pizzas. Some of the basic tomato sauce I made a couple of weeks ago and froze, black olives, thinly sliced onion, bell peppers, mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese with pepperoni on top. Rich opted to add some special olives to his pizza. Some sliced jalapeno and garlic stuffed olives we picked up on our last drive down from Oregon. He's been noshing on them a lot in the evenings lately and he decided to add some heat to his pizza by tossing them on instead of the black olives. Since he was entertaining Drew, I made his pizza for him.

Here's the pizza, on the peel with the sauce. I added the spicy olives first.



Here's Drew, looking at his pizza, which was in the oven while I was assembling Rich's pizza. If you look carefully, you can see the pizza in the oven.



Drew worked on entertaining me while we waited for his pizza to finish in the oven.



At dinner, Drew liked his pizza well enough. Rich loved his and got pretty excited about the possibilites of doing very strang things to pizza, including trying to make the taco pizza at home taste better than our current favorite, which is in Grants Pass at Wild River, which has good pizza and beer.






Who knew. Rich really likes my homemade pizza. I suspect this may cut into the few meals I manage to talk him into eating out.

Since Superbowl Sunday, I have made pizza twice again. And I suspect it will become a Sunday night staple around here. Drew likes it. Rich likes it. It's easy, and it's cheap. Okay.