Pizza Party!

So a couple of weeks ago I very randomly (as are most of my actions/obsessions) decided I wanted to make pizza from scratch. Dough from scratch, sauce from scratch and all of that. I quickly got to work reading all my favorite food blogs for inspiration and found a dough recipe. I feel lucky that the first dough recipe I ever tried was pretty much the best dough recipe ever....and am not sure if I will ever bother with another.

Anyway... I couldn't believe how EASY it was to make the dough! It literally takes barely any ingredients, dumped in the food processor...and one recipe makes enough dough for 3 pizzas. We mixed up the dough and then had to let it rest for about an hour. We left the dough looking like this:

We went out to run an errand (ie-buy a pizza stone) and came back to this:

crazy right??

Anyway, we used 1/3 of the dough to make pizza that night and froze the other two individually for pizza another night. I decided on a fontina cheese and mushroom pizza with homemade garlic tomato sauce. We prepped all the ingredients, pre-heated the stone in the oven at 500 for 30 minutes (the secret to the perfectly cooked crust!) and got ready to cook the pie....until...distaster struck.....we could not get the pizza off the counter in one piece. We had no idea what to do. Our perfectly prepared pizza would NOT come up..and we now had a 500 degree pizza stone that we were also trying to deal with. By the time we finally got the pizza on the stone, the results were not pretty....and due to the way the dough kind of folded over itself while trying to get it on the freaking stone, it was raw in some places and cooked in others... but I knew there was hope, because the parts that were good....were real good.

Our first pizza disaster:

I am very happy that the dough made enough for 3 pizzas because otherwise it might have been a while before I attempted pizza again after the last (very stressful) attempt. On Friday, we were getting really low on food and decided to attempt the pizza again with the random toppings that we did have in the house. This time, I made a few changes in my technique. I put a little more cornmeal on the bottom of the crust and rolled out the dough on a piece of parchment paper to allow for easier transport to the stone....this helped the pizza (and my sanity) stay intact. I opted to use olive oil and chopped garlic in lieu of a red sauce and then topped it with what I could find in my fridge pantry. Lucky for me I had some pretty delicious random ingredients laying around. So here is my goat cheese, onion, olive, chicken, tomato, parmesan cheese pizza with olive oil and garlic...and man was it delish! Seriously...perfectly cooked crust with delicious toppings.. I mean it was really really good.

My next attempt is going to be to re-create some Dewey's menu items. Whole cloves of roasted garlic? yes please!