Kneading Time

To be honest, I do not do much cooking that is enjoyable anymore. Most of the time our food considered by trying to do the healthiest things possible, as fast as possible. My weekends are a whirlwind of activity to prepare as much as possible for the coming week by cleaning, buying groceries, doing homework and trying to have a little fun with the family too. I enjoy it, but it means I go for easy on the food.

Recently we had a three day weekend because of Columbus Day and I decided to take Saturday and do something new. As it turned out, it was also a yucky weekend so we stayed inside. What to do? Sadly, I am 34 years old and I have never made my own pizza dough. I found a very cool cooking site: Susan's Cooking School. Not only did she have the recipes, but included videos. Since I was making the dough, I decided I would go ahead and make the sauce too.

I watched the videos, was loaded with confidence and made my ingredient list. Then I crossed my fingers as I scouted our commissary for those ingredients. Luckily, everything I needed was there, including bread flour! Granted, this process took much of my day with allowing the dough to rise multiple times. I'll admit that the initial creating the dough had me a bit concerned that I did something wrong but after I finished kneading it, which was quite the workout, it looked just right and did just what Susan said it would do. Once I realized it was turning out just fine, I had a lot of fun working with the dough! I did no elaborate tosses in the air, but stretching it out for the stone was really neat.

The sauce was fun to make too, but it was just not nearly as zesty as we would like. It was a little disappointing. I think I'll still use the recipe, just make a few tweaks.

For this particular pizza I browned Italian sausage and cut up pepperoni. It turned out quite yummy and there were no leftovers. Here is a picture of the final product.

I am looking forward to making pizza again, as well as trying out other homemade bread ideas.