Hot Tip: Fluffy Pizza

I really like the pizza I make at home.  We're pizza people, and having it available on-demand without delivery is fantastic.   I make big batches of dough in advance and divide them into pizza-sized baggies and then there's almost always dough around. 

Gorgonzola and Caramelized Onion Pizza

Yeah so I've been on the road.  At one point, my GPS said I was nowhere, which freaked me out.

Eggplant Parmesan Pizza

Typically on weeknights, I will either see Sous Chef Brian for a moment between work and his class, or speak to him on the phone for a minute.   I've said before, I'd almost rather not have that moment, because there's a whole lot of, "I paid that bill," "Did you call the vet," "Don't forget it's trash night," "Have you seen my good pants?" being fired off in both directions, and there just isn't enough time.  So, to add stress to that conversation, I'll often ask him what he wants for dinner.

Worse than that, I'll ask him if he's "had a chance to think about dinner," and the answer is always, "no."  Of course not. Who would?  He's looking for his good pants, and I'm digging my heels in and making it clear that class or not, trash night is his problem.  So I asked the other day and he said, "Is lasagna out of the question?"


How dare he?  I mean, really?  It's a weeknight.


I don't know why lasagna has such a bad rap.  Really, if you already have sauce made, and like me, you don't boil your noodles, lasagna takes 15 minutes to prepare your veg, 5 minutes to layer, and then it's all oven time.  Lasagna is not such a time suck.  But it has that feel to it.  "I made a lasagna," is often received with oohs and aahs.  Really folks, it's pasta with veg, but you made it in the oven.  


Anyhow.  He actually said, "Is lasagna out of the question, and do we have eggplant?"  These aren't words that are commonly linked in our home.  I've never made or eaten lasagna with eggplant.  But OMG did eggplant lasagna sound good.  And I have a freezer full of diced eggplant.  This was going to be spectacular.  On a weeknight, no less.


I got my eggplant defrosting, realized I had no sauce so started making my quick-ish winter sauce, and turned on some music from my youth.  It was on.  On a weeknight. 


Then I opened the cabinet and saw that I had four (4) lasagna noodles.  It was pretty obvious, I keep them in a big glass jar.  Lasagna was out of the question.*


The pizza place by my office puts anything on pizza.  It's amazing to me that I can point at a slice and say, "What's that?" and they'll say, "Ranch" all matter-of-fact and slightly irked that I can't recognize the white sauce, and I'll be like, "Ranch and what?" And they'll just say, "Fried chicken."  Oh yeah, that goes on pizza.  Sorry I didn't recognize that traditional classic.  These are the same folks that make cheeseburger pizza, taco pizza, and french fry pizza.  One thing I've seen, but not had, is eggplant parmesan pizza.  I had a pizza dough in the freezer.  Luckily, it was Sous Chef Brian's late class, and I had defrost time.  

Spinach and Pepperoni Calzones

My husband, who enjoys pizzas and pastas of all kinds, and believes that cheese is a food group, does not like calzones.  Calzones.  Pizza dough filled with ricotta.  And other stuff.  He does not like this.  So, I think I've had a calzone three times in the last more-than-a-decade.  Because you don't order a calzone on your own, and it's sad to watch someone force his way through a piece of calzone... it's not like it's lima beans, or beets.


So when I was planning out meals for the week, I was like, "Oh, and I'm gonna make calzones," and he was like, "Ok.  I guess."  


Seriously, cheese in dough gets an, "Ok, I guess." 


He thinks they're unwieldy.  Too much cheese in one spot, too much crust in the others.   Seriously. 


But we can make them at home, just as cheesy and delicious but more, um, wieldy, right?


I started with regular whole wheat pizza dough.

Just Some Pizzas

Yeah, I make a lot of pizzas.  Some are winners, some are not.  In a week where I make pizza, I typically make two, because my dough makes two crusts.

Basic Tomato Sauce

A few weeks ago I got all those tomatoes, remember?  I had seeded and drained them and hidden them away in freezer bags.   So it was time to make sauce.  A while back I made my "winter sauce" from canned tomatoes, and this is what I do in the summer with real ones. 

Ordering in! Pizza and Salad from SliCE

Slice - excuse me - SliCE - is the closest "fancy" pizza place around. You know, a place where not everything is on top of red sauce. I make a lot of pizza, but sometimes you don't want to turn on the oven.  This is their Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese pizza.  

It was great, and Brian said it might be the best he's ever had.  

Nice thin crust.

Good smattering of toppings. 

I love that they call it Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese - but you know, it's got a good bit of bacon on top.  That's not even part of the title.  As I said here, and  say all the time, bacon is a seasoning, and clearly they understand that. 


Slice makes a bit point on their website about how they focus only on pizza and don't have frozen/fried appetizers or hoagies or any of the other stuff common at pizza places around here.   They do, however, have awesome salads.

This photo doesn't quite do justice to the Signature salad.  Arugula, pine nuts, gorgonzola and a raspberry vinaigrette that avoids that overly-syrupy taste of bottled dressings.  


I had a lame week for CSA greens, so ordering in a salad like this was great.  There was enough salad for three good servings, so I was able to bring it for lunch the next day. 

Three Cheese Garlic Fennel Pizza

I posted on Facebook that I should rename my blog Fajitas and Salad Dressing, because it feels like that's all I make, but I do make a lot of pizza too.


Speaking of Facebook, are you doing the Google+?  How's it working for you?  I have these high hopes that it can replace everything else on the interwebs.  Rather than follow folks and be followed on Twitter, I can connect with all of those people on G+, and also have my friends, colleagues and family circles, replacing Facebook.  But it's not there yet.  I'm connected to a number of food people on there, and it seems like we're collectively not sure how G+ fits in.   I never set up a Saturday's Mouse Facebook page, but that means that I post links on my regular personal page and get comments and input that other readers don't get to see.  Maybe G+ is the answer.


But what are we supposed to do with it, all have a hangout and knead dough on webcam together?


So for now, I post these things here, and link to them on Twitter, FB, G+... I'm trying to keep the Saturday's Mouse-related content fairly consistent between the three.


Anyhow, I make a lot of pizza, right?  Because pizza is good.   Start with dough.   Also preheat the oven.


I got fennel through the CSA, specifically for pizza.   I'm not into licorice, anise, fennel, etc, but when you saute fennel for just a bit it gets sweet and peppery and loses that love-it-or-hate it intense flavor.   The fennel bulbs were super small - weirdly flat too.

Grilled Pizza, again.

I contacted Maya, the winner of the bowl covers, and she said the following:

I can't even remember the last time I won a contest! My senior year in high school my name was picked first out of a hat to choose a passage from Hamlet to memorize. But I don't think that counts.

She selected this bold, fun print and they're on their way. 

Anyway, I said there'd be food. 

Sometimes you and your friends get together and make your own ricotta, make up some pesto, and grill up fantastic pizza, but you're not at home and you don't take photos of the process and then somebody jumps in and takes photos once it's over and tells you you should post it.  And you know, it's good pizza and people like to hear about good pizza, so you post it. 

Sometimes that happens.  And it's nighttime, and you're grilling and you're eating outside, so the photos look like this.

And sometimes one of your friends makes a salad that sounds mind-numbingly simple but might be life-changing. Chickpeas. Red Onion.  Tomato. Oil. Vinegar. Scapes. Nom.  

And sometimes eggplant gets that rich smoky flavor that makes it seem like it's not just a veg with a bit of tomato sauce and a blanket of mozzarella...like there's something way more complicated going on.

Hot tip on pesto.  

I used a ton of basil and a good amount of parmesan and pine nuts and olive oil... it was like two a half cups of basil, 1/3 cup oil, 1/3 cup pine nuts and 1/2 cup parm...one garlic clove, black pepper, salt...  and it was kind of lame. I mean it tasted good, but not super basily.  A little too salty.  Then I let it sit an hour and it got awesome.  Like fight over the leftovers awesome.  Dip your finger in the bowl, again, awesome.   So let your pesto develop. 

Fig and Prosciutto Pizza

What sort of pizza you have varies a lot by your neighborhood.   When we lived in the suburbs, pizza was like meat or veg on dough, and that was pizza and it was fine.   The farther north we went (read: Jersey), the better a plain slice of pizza got.  Then I was in the city all the time, exposed to things like buffalo chicken pizza and white pizza and pizza with dollops of ricotta and (seriously) french fry pizza and such, but Sous Chef Brian didn't see these things.   By the time we moved to the city, I was horrified by all the misc foods folks were putting on pizza, but there was still fancy pizza.  Pizza with asparagus and feta, or with fennel and blue cheese, or with figs and prosciutto.  Fancy pizza was a whole new thing.  

We've made far more "fancy" pizzas than we've ordered.  If we're ordering pizza these days, it's probably a whole wheat "caprese" pizza, which is basil and chunks of mozzarella, but if we're making pizza, it's whatever veg or meat we have in the house plus some interesting cheese.

So several months ago I suggested we call up the known "fancy" pizza place, and Sous Chef Brian was like, "Yeah, let's get a plain pie and compare it to what we usually get."  But I talked him into fancy.  So we got a fig and prosciutto pizza, and in the end he said he liked it, but it had too much fig.

Neither of us had really ever eaten fig outside of Newton format.  I don't think either of us had ever eaten prosciutto outside of hoagie format. 

Grilled Pizza

When I first posted pizza on the blog, I mentioned that it was best grilled, but that had to wait for summer.  Well, April is summer as far as I'm concerned.  It's time.


A note on the seasons.  Apparently, I had no idea it was April.  The other day, I said it was too early for asparagus, which of course, it is not.  I'm catching up now.   It's asparagus time.  Right now.   Here's a map of what's in season, and of course, it tells me the only thing going on right now is asparagus.  Of course, there's still lettuces and leafy greens and artichoke and such.  

Delicious Toast

I worked late again last night, and asked Brian to make dinner. He's on spring break and has the time.  Also, I told him I wanted cheese.

So I feel like I'm posting a recipe off the back of a box here, but this is a trick we'll employ again, because it worked.  Naan, garlic naan more specifically, is pizza waiting to happen.

Chard and Bacon Pizza

Remember when I made the pizza the other day and said you get two pizzas from a batch of dough? Here's round two.

Meat"ball" Pizza

Pizza.  Where it all began.

I mean that in a few ways. 

When I was much less experienced at cooking, and we were much more likely to eat something out of a box, I started buying balls of pizza dough at my grocery store.  I think making my own pizza - even though I wasn't making the dough - was the start of our increased appreciation for making our food at home.  With that came choosing interesting ingredients, being more fully in control of what we were consuming, and increased confidence in my ability to cook things myself and enjoy them more than if I had paid someone else to cook them.

I started making pizza dough a couple of years ago, and I remember how scared I was to use yeast for the first time.  I used to be a terrible baker - my inability to cook anything that included flour was a running joke.  I'm not really into most baked goods, so I still don't do a lot of baking, but when I do bake, it typically works out, and I've been able to tackle a few breads and slightly more advanced recipes, so pizza dough was really my intro into making doughs and such.

And finally, the blog.  A few weeks ago, I emailed a few friends my pizza dough recipe, and one of them suggested I start a blog, and I was like, yeah.  So, yeah.

So this is the same recipe I posted in the beginning, now with photos and a different topping.

Pizza Dough

Well that looks a bit sad, but I didn't know I was writing a food blog when I made the pizza, so poorly taken photos of leftovers is what we have.

Here's my dough "recipe":

First a note - you have to want it. If you can get a ball of dough in the deli case for $1.29, ask yourself, what are you saving and why. Why do you want to spend three hours on dough? Also, I'm not good with recipes. I feel like I should give you more info than "do this then that".

[Edited to add: There's a step-by-step version of this, with photographs, here.]