What a blast! I invited both and over last night to help me and Karsten finish off the pizza and I made Sunday night. It was a great time. Poor , who’s horribly allergic to cats, took a dose of Alavert and Zyrtec to be around our six felines, and still sounded awful by 10 PM. (Though , if you ever need to voice a spot where you sound like you have a miserable cold — you know, for that whole wintertime sound — I think you should just come over and hang out with our kitties for a few hours.)
and I are more convinced than ever about starting our own pizzeria. We’ve got our crusts (one thin and one thick), we’ve got our sauces (one tomato-y and one spicy), we’ve got a plan (all vegetarian!), and we even have our food critic ()! 😉 We’re all set.
Oh, and can I just say: either one of those two alone is hilarious. Put them together, and I feel like I’m in the middle of a freakin’ comedy sketch. It’s the perfect way to spend an evening.
Our group would be more than happy to taste test the pizza pies!
Would you believe I just ran into at Starbucks?
Had a terrific time. Lots of fun. Good pizza. Great company.
BAD ALLERGIES.
It got progressively worse as I went home where I immediately showered, and dowsed myself in eucalyptous oil so I could breathe.
I feel fine this morning despite the THIRTY-FIVE minute drive into town on Westbound I-24 which was like a fucking parking lot in this horrible weather.
Ugh.
Have a great one Kate!
Small freakin’ town. Half a million people in this city, and it’s still a small town.
Sorry to hear how bad your allergies were. Guess we’ll have to stick to hanging out in smoky bars, which is obviously much healthier. 😉
Recipes, recipes!
I make great calzones, but I haven’t found a recipe for pizza dough (d’ohh!) that I think a damn of. So, if you feel like sharing, I would love to know what you’re doing for sauce and dough, both. Merci!
As a fellow cat allergy-sufferer, I have a hint for nightfly (still not sure how to do that LJ-user markup thing)–use OTC allergy nasal spray with the Zyrtec. Works like a charm for short-term. Can’t help with smokey bars though, if you figure that out, let me know.
I’ll taste-test your veggie pizzas, but I abhor mozzarella cheese. Any cheeseless ones in the works? If you’re doing veggie, you have to have a vegan option as well! 🙂
Oh, you definitely should be a taste-tester. And we’ll work on the vegan option, for sure. For now, my “vegan” version uses soy cheese, but I don’t like vegan soy cheese, so I always use the kind with casein in it. It just melts better.
But we could do cheeseless, too! That’s probably a good option to have.
By the way, to do the lj user thing, you put the following between angle brackets:
I’m doing this from memory – will check proportions when I get home and post a revised version if I’ve screwed something up monumentally.
Ingredients:
1 c hot water (I just run the tap until it’s as hot as it gets and use that)
1 envelope yeast (I use the fast-rising highly active stuff)
1 T your choice of yeast food (white sugar, brown sugar, honey, steak tartare…;-)
3 c your choice of flour (I use 2 c unbleached white and 1 c whole wheat; I’ve used white wheat, regular whole wheat, and whole wheat pastry and each has worked about as well as the next)
1/4 c olive oil (does not have to be imported from a small exclusive olive garden in Capri – whatever you use in your everyday salad dressings will suffice; I buy Bertolli’s in bulk at Sam’s, steep garlic in it, reserve the “roast” garlic for another use [say, as a pizza topping], and use the garlic oil in this and for other things)
1 t table salt
Method(ish):
Put the water in an ovenproof bowl (which is most bowls, these days, it seems – just don’t use the Limoges) and stir the sugary yeast-food into it until the latter dissolves. Pour the yeast on top and whisk it in with a fork. The resulting liquid should be beigely cloudy, with not a lot of undissolved yeast sitting around at its edges.
Put the bowl in the oven for five minutes to proof the yeast. (Sounds like you’re a baker and so know what this looks like – if not, say so and I’ll elaborate.)
Meanwhile, mix the flour and the salt in a larger ovenproof bowl and make a well in the middle of it.
When the yeast mixture has proofed, pour it into the well and follow suit with the olive oil.
Mix the whole shebang up with your favorite stirring ingredient just until all the flour’s incorporated. I’m a wooden-spoon girl, myself. (I daresay this would work in a KitchenAid, but I’ve not tried it yet that way.)
Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead it, adding more flour as needed, until it’s springy and resistant when you push on it. (Again, you probably know what this looks and feels like.)
Dump a little more olive oil into the mixing bowl and coat the inside of the bowl with it.
Put the dough in the bowl and cover it thoroughly. If you have a bread-proofing bowl, that’s ideal. If you don’t – and I don’t, because my family refuses to buy me any more kitchen equipment, dammit – you can use Saran Wrap if you have the Saran Wrap touch. The stuff hates me with a passion and always determinedly sticks to itself when I try to use it, so I give that a pass. Instead, I put the bowl inside a plastic grocery bag, tie the bag closed on the side of the bowl, and put a rubber band around the rim of the bowl just below the edge, to approximate an air-tight seal.
Put the bowl back in the preheated oven and let the dough rise for at least 45 minutes.
Once it’s risen once, punch it down. At that point, you can do any one of several things with it. (Well, okay, there are probably more options than that – but this is a family LJ, right,
If you don’t own pizza pans, I recommend acquiring them. They’re not too expensive, and they’re well worth the having. When I’m not making pizza in mine, I use them as covers for my largest frying pans (I use my deep-dish pan for making enormous chocolate-chip cookies for birthdays!).
Again, from memory. In this case that’s not quite as scary, because I made it up and no baking-type chemistry’s involved.
Sorry about the lousy formatting on the first recipe. I’ll try to get all my bullets in a row on this one.
Ingredients:
Method:
Let me know if anything here or in the crust recipe is confusing, seems wrong, or just generally alienates you ;-).
Vegan pizza – good call! Hm…
On the dairy-cheese subject: are there other sorts of cheese you like? I’ve made pizzas with feta before, for example, and been quite happy with the result.
Mmmmm, feta. I love pretty much any type of cheese but mozzarella, just hate that one, don’t know why. Feta is great on pizza, so is goat cheese (in small doses, had a pizza at Blackstone that was WAY too heavy on the goat cheese, ick).
You know what’s really good is pesto with roma tomatoes and feta. And spinach.
Man, I really want pizza now!