Food Friday: Cheater “Homemade” Pizza!

When we lived in Boston during graduate school, we had dinner every Wednesday night with our best friend Beth. We’d rotate week-by-week between our two apartments. Sometimes we’d invite other friends to join us, sometimes it would be just us, and our “Wednesday Night Dinner” was always special. Many a glass of wine and 20-something-meaning-of-life-conversations were had! We did it for six years. And then graduate school ended, Braydon and I moved for my Lehigh job, Beth went on to seminary, and we have missed our Wednesday Night Dinners ever since. We dream of one day living close together again and getting back to our old routine. Hopefully some day that dream will come true. In the meantime I find myself reminiscing dreamily of those Wednesday nights. Very often when we’d go to Beth’s house she’d make pizza. She had worked in a gourmet pizza shop during college and she wasn’t afraid to get creative. Early on she figured out a SUPER trick: buying the pizza dough from a nearby pizza place. Not only did this cut out a huge step — thereby making the pizza making so much simpler — but very often the pizza dough from a good pizza parlor was a lot better than any we could ever hand-make. The trick stuck. After Braydon and I moved from Boston we went several years with hardly ever making our own pizza. Honestly, it made me miss Beth too much to do it. Plus, we could get amazing pizza in our new region of the country (NY/NJ/and even eastern-PA has some awesome pizza!). But recently I’ve started making “homemade” pizza more often. I call this Cheater Pizza because — like Beth — I’m no fool, and I buy the dough at our local pizza shop. Most people don’t even realize it, but if you go into a pizza place and ask for a dough ball they’ll almost always sell you one for a buck or two (usually even at chain pizza places). This makes pizza making incredibly easy, quick, and fun.

Kyle, Owen, and Meera love pizza. We still buy pizza a lot. But we also can have a really good time making “homemade” pizza together at home. The bambinos’ favorites are plain cheese or cheese and pepperoni. I buy a really good jar of gourmet pizza sauce from the grocery store, we slather it on all over the spread out dough (so as to avoid making any ‘crust’ on the edges of the pizza… because they “don’t like” the “crust part”), then sprinkle on grated mozzarella and pepperoni, and we are good to go. All you need to make awesome homemade pizza is a good pizza stone. We heat ours up in the oven to 450-500 degrees. Then we put the stretched out pizza dough right on it, top with the ingredients, then place back in the hot oven to bake. Cooking it this way, it only takes about 5-10 minutes for the pizza to be ready. Just long enough to set the table, toss a salad, and pour our drinks.

Over the past couple of months we’ve taken some pictures of our pizza and pizza making. A favorite is BBQ Chicken Pizza.  Over a layer of BBQ sauce we throw on diced leftover chicken, slices fresh mozzerella, and fresh sliced red onion.  This stuff is awesome.

The best part about doing pizza this way is that while Braydon and the bambinos run out to buy the dough ball I have a few minutes to heat up the pizza stone and prep the ingredients. When they walk in the door we can get right to the fun part– assembling the pizza. It is all lickety-split.

This is one of our favorite “Beth Pizzas”: brie cheese, slivered almonds, and sliced green apple. You bake the pizza with just the brie and almonds, and then right when it comes out of the oven you put the cold, crisp, tart, fresh apples on there. Seriously, if you’ve never had brie pizza, try it. It is to die for. Eating it brings back so many good memories of eating pizza in Beth’s kitchen in her apartment in Brookline.

A new favorite of ours is pizza with balsamic vinegar drizzled on it. You can drizzle it on before or after the baking, but we prefer it to be done before so that it gets baked right in. K & O (Owen especially) love pretty much anything with balsamic vinegar on it.

In this case we had some leftover grilled chicken breast. But I’ve often used rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Easy.

There are tons of great pizza ideas out there. And Beth used to make some incredible ones (like a potato pizza that was out of this world!). Three more of our other favorites are:

• pesto, mozzarella, roasted red pepper
• alfredo sauce, cooked shrimp, parmesan, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice
• “Mexican”: salsa, ground beef or chicken, fresh chopped tomatoes, cheddar

This is pizza making at it’s super easiest best and it is very fun to do. I highly recommend this to all you graduate students, medical students, and law students who are reading! Tell me if you try it!!!

I also highly recommend this to families with young kids. I have this thing about wanting my kids to know how some of their favorite “treat” foods (that we usually only buy or eat in restaurants) are made. I have made a point to cook some of these things with them so that they “get it” that it is all created somehow someway by someone. We’ve made doughnuts together, french fries together, popsicles together, etc. Pizza is on that list. I want them to know how it is done so that they never think that you can just pay a few bucks and —ta da!!!— something magically appears. No… somebody —an actual person— had to make that out of real ingredients (or at least somebody could make it — and used to make it — even if now a machine might often be involved). It is really awesome for kids to make things that they love to eat, and to understand how some of their favorite “junk foods” are created… however, nobody is going to enjoy any of it if we’re stressed about stuff like kneading dough and waiting all day long for it to rise and then dealing with a flour-covered wreck-of-a-kitchen. Yes, I know, I know, pizza dough is actually not hard at all to make. (and yes, I have made it with K & O, so they do know you don’t just buy it at Sal’s Pizza Parlor). But really– buying a dough ball for a dollar makes the whole thing soooo much more fun and stress-free. It makes it actually possible to whip it up quick on a busy weeknight or after we come home from a weekend outing. It is a great idea for kids’ parties too: make your own pizza! (just cheat and buy the dough balls! your life will be so much easier!) And with a salad, or a bowl of fruit, this really can be a dinner to celebrate!