Pizza Night!

One of our favorite dinners around here is pizza. I like to make a big batch of pizza dough on the weekend and freeze it until we're ready to use it that week. In the morning before leaving for work, I take it out of the freezer and put it on the counter so it's ready to roll out when I get home.

For my pizza dough recipe, I look to none other than Giada De Laurentiis. If you've tried any of my cooking, chances are you've had one of Giada's recipes. She is my absolute favorite chef. In my eyes, she can do no wrong. After David and I got married, I figured I should be a proper wife and learn how to cook, so I watched Everyday Italian on Food Network and Giada taught me how to cook! Ok, enough Giada love. Go here to check out the recipe I use and watch a video tutorial (the only thing I do differently is switch out 1 or 2 cups of regular flour for whole wheat to give it a little more nutritional value).

David's pizza from tonight. Bacon and cheese. A manly man pizza.

 

We like thin crust, so I roll out the dough as thin as I can and it gets nice and crispy.

My pizza looks a little different. I skip the cheese, and instead pile on veggies. Tonight I used sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, and broccoli.

 

I like to drizzle the broccoli with olive oil and sprinkle on salt and pepper so it gets all burnt and crispy.

I make my own pizza sauce as well. Ideally, I'd use my own tomatoes, but we didn't get to plant a garden this year since we moved right in the middle of summer. What we've done the past few years is freeze all the tomatoes we don't use so that even in the dead of winter we can have home-grown tomatoes to use for pizza sauce.

It really is a lot easier than you might think to make homemade pizza sauce. Tonight I tried out Tyler Florence's recipe and really liked it (I got to use our own basil in the recipe! We still have some left from what we dried last summer - our basil went crazy last year!). I like to make a double batch of sauce so I can put the leftovers in a mason jar and freeze it so all I have to do is thaw it out the next night we want pizza.

Now that I've got a good savory pizza recipe down, I want to try out dessert pizza! I'm picturing chocolate chip with powdered sugar or cinnamon swirl. Any volunteer taste-testers out there? ;)

~Tammy