Pizza Night

Monday is my cleaning day and after I get finished scrubbing I try to have something easy on hand for dinner so I'm not tempted to pick something up if I'm too tired to cook. Yesterday pizza sounded really good and I happened to have some mozzarella from my freezer stash. I am currently sans KitchenAid and I refuse to let Bryan spend the money on one right now. I feel validated by a recent church message that said you have to have faith and courage to say "I can't afford it." So, to broke people everywhere I say, 'we can do it without stand mixers!' Ha. My mom would laugh at that since most people live their entire lives without such a convenience. I'm spoiled.

Well last night I roughed it and made dough by hand. It was sooo much fun! Even after cleaning all day, twice in the kitchen because of a project I kinda sorta helped my sister-in-law with. I had forgotten how fun it is to knead dough. I highly recommend it on stressful days...just be careful not to over-knead :). I found a nice dough recipe here. I also noticed I'm not the only spoiled person around. I had to search for a bit before I found a recipe that didn't say something like "add ingredients to stand mixer." I'm sure I could have figured out how to do those by hand but it was cleaning day, remember?

 yeast are amazing creatures

Any who, after our last so-called "convenient" store bought pizza dough I was pleased to find a hand made dough that was so quick and easy. I used bread-maker all purpose flour (you can find this in the same place as regular flour just check the labels) that is great for dough because it has more protein and thus makes for great gluten formation. What? It makes for a great stretchy dough which is exactly what we look for for pizza.

 what a difference the camera flash makes

I didn't use a pizza stone, I threw it out, where do you keep a big clanky stone at? I decreased the temperature by 50 degrees and cooked my pizza for about 12-13 minutes.

Bryan loved it. He asked if I had done the breakdown on how much the whole thing cost me to make. I bought the cheese from Costco and froze it in smaller bags, I used leftover pasta sauce and veggies from other recent dinners, and the pepperoni I got at Aldi's for about $2.00. Overall for two 12 inch pizzas I figure the total would ring in around $3.00 or less. I still have tons of pepperoni too. The great part is I used things already in the fridge. Pizza saved me from spoilage. That is poetry. So it was a delicious quick dinner for less than take-out. And there are left-overs for lunch.
Make your pizza Chicago style by laying your crust in an 8 inch round pan. Be careful loading on the toppings or the crust won't cook through. If you just gotta go pizza pie and love your toppings and sauce then bake your crust for a few minutes before loading it up. Then you'll be good to go.