Gotta start somewhere

I don't know how many times I have heard the words "you have to start a blog!" escape the mouth of my roommate. "Yeah, maybe..." I would more than often answer. But today, for some reason, it just felt like a good time. Maybe it's because I will be leaving in 17 short days for an adventure spanning Southeast Asia, or maybe it's because I made homemade pizza for lunch and thought that if I could pass on the recipe to someone else I'd be doing my job at paying it forward. Anyway, for whatever reason here it is!

Homemade pizza can seem like a pretty daunting task. It's not a common misconception that it takes a lot of time, but you'll be glad to find out it just isn't the case! And who knew it could be so easy. I started off by finding what seemed to be a promising recipe from the net (http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/pizza-dough-iii/Detail.aspx) and modified it to my liking. I spent one summer working at a restaurant that made many different kinds of food, thankfully one of them being pizza! This recipe for the dough resembled the one from the place I used to work at, I just substituted the sugar for 2 tsp of honey and added a little bit of flour to keep the dough from sticking to my fingers.

So here is the final recipe:

Ingredients
1 package active dry yeast (I used Fleischmann's)
1 cup warm water
2 cups flour (plus extra for rolling out the dough)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tsp honey


After dissolving the yeast in the warm water and letting it stand for about 10 minutes, I mixed all the ingredients together in a large glass bowl until a ball of dough had formed. In order for the dough to rise it needs to be covered and placed in a relatively warm area. I covered the bowl with a tea towel and placed it in the cupboard on top of my fridge (it actually gets pretty warm up there!).

After 30 minutes of anticipation I checked on my yeast ball and it had risen to about twice its original size. Things were going according to plan.

I divided up the dough into 4 portions (each one big enough for a personal pizza). I dusted the counter top with flour and using a roiling pin I rolled out the dough into the size of a dinner plate. My roommate and I had decided on the pizzas we were going to make:

Pizza 1: caramelized onions, goat cheese and mushroom
Pizza 2: Caprese salad pizza

For the first pizza I sliced one red onion and fried it in about a tbsp of butter and 2 tbsp of brown sugar for about 10 minutes and this was the result:










Moving on to the mushrooms (you will soon find out that my roommate is addicted to them and sometimes I make her mushroom filled food as a bribe, or in some instances just to be nice. More often as a bribe though...)

I sliced about 2 cups of fresh mushrooms (from the Jean Talon market oh my!) and fried them for about 5 minutes in a tbsp of butter. I set the onions and mushrooms aside and proceeded to spoon out a healthy portion of canned pizza sauce on to my rolled out pizza dough.



 

Next I added the mushrooms, onions and a few tbsp of goat cheese and this pizza was ready to go. On to pizza 2.

Goat Cheese, Caramelized Onion and Mushroom Pizza

It's just starting to feel like summer so what better way to celebrate than with caprese salad? I can think of a better way: on a pizza. I used a basting brush to spread about a tsp of olive oil onto my pizza dough then I topped it off with sliced, ripe tomato and buffalo mozzarella. I set aside some fresh basil leaves (straight from the planters on my balcony) to add to the pizza once it came out of the oven.

Caprese Salad Pizza

Now, how to cook these bad boys? I'm a big fan of Italian pizza which traditionally has really thin crust and is cooked at a very high heat. So I turned my oven up as high as it would go and popped the pizzas in for about 5-7 minutes. I recommend cooking them on a cookie sheet or pizza tray but be careful using stoneware at a very high heat (mine may have exploded in the oven today). To finish them off I put the oven on broil until the cheese turned golden brown. Then it was a race between my roommate and I for the best slice.



After devouring our pizzas for lunch we decided to make the two remaining balls of dough for dinner. This time I added sausage to pizza 1 and it was even better than before. For the last, but by no means least pizza, my roommate suggested we try and recreate the famous spinach and cheese from Danny's pizza (usually enjoyed at 3:30 am) minus the spinach (we didn't have any and the downpour going on outside deterred us from leaving the house). I added olive oil to the dough once more and topped it with one clove of crushed garlic, shredded mozzarella, buffalo mozzarella, goat cheese and shredded parmesan. Again, we cooked the pizzas at high heat and then broiled until golden brown.

Garlic and 4 Cheese

It really was a sad moment as we took our last bites. Now, after all this cooking (what a way to procrastinate) it was time for me to hit the books. Schistosoma and Malaria here I come.