Saturday, July 29, 2006

Pizza Pizza

This morning I was cruising around my favorite foodie blogs and stopped in to see what Biscuit Girl has been doing at You Gonna Eat All That. She recently had a run in with fresh homemade pizza. Well, damn, that's what I have to have for dinner. Thanks for the suggestion!

I made a quick basic tomato sauce. I took 3 tomatoes and whizzed them in the food processor and then simmered them for 10 minutes to help get some of the extra water to simmer out. Done.


Chopped some fresh basil, thinnly sliced some onions and some fresh mozzarella.

The pizza dough came from Trader Joe's. So easy.

Pulled out the dough to about 12 inches wide. Spooned on some sauce, spread some basil, onions, crushed red pepper, cheese and threw them in the oven for 6-10 minutes (450 degrees) until delicious!


Sauce, Basil, Onions!

Mozzarella and a drizzle of olive oil.

Pizza 1 is done.

Pizza 2 is done.

We have a pizza stone for our oven. I keep it in there all the time. I think it helps give us a little more even heating. In preparing for making the pizzas, I sprinkled some corn meal on the stone before the oven started heating up. I wanted to make sure the dough could hit the stone, so I prepared the pizzas on a flat cookie sheet sprinkled with corn meal as well. When I was ready to put the pizza in the oven, I gave the cookie sheet a shimmie to loosen the pizza and then it slid right onto the stone. Perfecto!

The pizzas were really tasty and good. But too much for the two of us. Should have just made one pizza, but since I hadn't made these before, I didn't know if the one package of dough from TJ's would be enough for dinner...so I bought two and we ate two...well, most of it anyway. Mmm, good.

Now we will wait awhile and eat the TJ's Key Lime Cheesecake for dessert! Will let you know how it is.

~~

11 comments:

Barbara said...

OMG. we're on the same wavelength today. My brother Richard is here to visit and he and I went to a cooking class at Galileo today. Hubby was sweet and cooked pizza for dinner, with TJ's dough of course. AND....we had TJ's Key Lime Cheesecake for dessert too!

Great minds think alike.

Barbara said...

By the way, forgot to say you're pizza looks great!!

ScottE. said...

That's FUNNY! I walked past the cheesecake in the store and it looked satisfying...so I grabbed one on a whim. It was tasty!

Dancer in DC said...

The only thing I said I would change is to make the dough thinner if possible (Scott's got me hooked on thin crust now). But the flavor was great and it certainly was fast.

Stef said...

That does look delicious! I've been craving pizza for the last few days. I think I'm going to have to satisfy myself with the Lean Cuisine version I've got in the freezer. But I'll pretend it looks like yours!!!

Brunette said...

Yours is the second enthusiastic endorsement I've heard for TJ's pizza dough. I'll have to give it a try!

The Key Lime Cheesecake sounds divine, too. If you're feeling ambitious sometime, there's a great KL cheesecake recipe on epicurious.com. It's a crowd-pleaser and it's one of the few desserts I'm really comfortable making!

Anonymous said...

I don't have a TJ's nearby (one apparently is in the works, but i'm not confident, considering the zoning issues that have come up), so I get my pizza dough at Whole Foods, which makes some mighty fine calzones. I've yet to make my own pizza sauce though -- sounds pretty simple, though.

Emma Christensen said...

Stumbled on your blog via Well Fed--I also recently caught the the Homemade Pizza Bug! I've had a lot of fun with toppings--carmalizing the onions before putting them on the pizza is fa-BU-louuuus! Goat cheese from the farmer's market is my new fav.

Also, I've gotten into making my own dough. I found a fairly quick, easy recipe for thin-crust in one of the Cook's Illustrated cookbooks, and have modified it to be a bit more health-friendly. You make it the night before (prep time ~10 min) and then use it to make pizza within a few days. Here's the link to my recent blog post with the recipe:

http://my3loves.blogspot.com/2006/07/baking-pizza-time.html

Oh, pizza bliss...

Lady Brandenburg said...

Lord B and I made pizza last night thanks for the idea! We used TJ dough and TJ pizza sauce, fresh mozz and pepperoni, added onions and sliced garlic. VERY good... except... clearly we need a pizza stone because the middle of the pizza did NOT cook evenly on our facacta baking sheet and some parts tasted dough-y and undercooked. Other than that, yum yum.

ScottE. said...

lady B: Rock on...so excited you tried the pizza. I do like the TJ's dough and the pizza stone really helps. I think you can find them fairly cheap these days and I do keep mine in the oven 95% of the time, so space isn't really an issue.

WAHOO!!!

ScottE. said...

Emma C: Thanks for stopping by. I looked back at your site and need to share with some of the readers of this blog. Emma mentions how weight watcher's friend a homemade pizza can be!!!