Ciao Bella! Janet's Pizza Night - Recipe

 

Buon Giorno! Welcome to the day after Janet's Pizza Night!

I'm feeling pretty good today because all the kids in The Better Halves love me because I fed them PIZZA!

(Yes, after torturing the kids with dinners like Spinach Pie and Roasted Vegetable Pasta Primavera --including...ack...asparagus--I'm shamelessly making them love me again with super kid-friendly pizza.)

At last week's Better Halves' meeting (more on those later!), we discussed adding some meat-free nights to the rotation. So--sorry, kiddos--no pepperoni...just cheese with tomato sauce for you. And for the grown-ups, lots of slow-roasted tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, goat cheese...and--because I'm a little bit crazy--an all-zucchini pizza that some enjoyed and some didn't... 

(Can't win 'em all!)

For good measure, I included a simple romaine lettuce salad (read: a bowl of lettuce), as well as an arugula salad with raspberry balsamic vinaigrette and pine nuts. The arugula was mostly for me because I'm wild about the stuff. The plain lettuce was for arugula-haters and kids.

Don't be a hater. Arugula is the best.

Ok...I promised recipes, so here goes:

Step One: Go to your local pizza parlor. 

Step Two: Buy a bunch of pizzas. (I kid! I kid!) 

Actually, what I was going to say is: "buy a bunch of pizza DOUGH." --Hello! This brilliant idea is courtesy of Krista, who discovered how relatively cheap, easy and super delicious it is to use professionally-made dough in your recipes. For each ball of dough (enough for one large pizza), it was just $2.50. --Nice.

(If you don't want to buy dough from a pizza place, I have also used frozen bread dough from the grocery store. Even cheaper, but it requires some planning to defrost the dough and let it rise properly. Yesterday was crazy busy, so pizza parlor dough to the rescue!)

Ingredients:

pizza dough

flour

olive oil

roma tomatoes

garlic (optional)

zucchini (optional)

fresh basil (I didn't have any, but it would have been good!)

kosher salt

pepper

fresh mozzarella

goat cheese

good parmesan cheese

kid-friendly pizza sauce (either make your own or buy it pre-made...hey, they're kids! they don't care...)

pre-shredded mozzarella

I apologize in advance because this is kind of a free-form recipe. I'll try in the future to use more precise measurements. 

In a 350 oven, roast a cookie sheet full of sliced roma tomatoes drizzled generously with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper. (Optional: add garlic!) 

While roasting the tomatoes, you can add a pan of thinly sliced zucchini (if you dare!), also with olive oil, salt, pepper. 

Roast these while you prepare the dough and other pizza ingredients...so, anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. 

Dust a large surface with flour and channel your inner pizza chef...begin working the dough by pressing it with your fingers. 

You then follow the steps you learned while working at Domino's Pizza during your college years...oh, wait. That was just me. And--truth is--I was never very good at it because I mostly just answered the phones. BUT, shaping the dough is not very hard, and it's kind of fun to do. (Click HERE for helpful video about shaping pizza dough by some stranger in Canada.) And, yes, mine turned out just as perfectly as hers...or, not really.

Once your dough is shaped, put it on whatever you can find to bake it. I borrowed Keri's pizza stone and shoved the rest onto cookie sheets. Because, really, it's just pizza.

For the kid-friendly pizza, ladle on a medium-ish amount of pizza sauce, smoothing it around with the back of the spoon, again channeling your inner pizza chef. 

Sprinkle with regular, store-grade shredded mozzarella. Then set it aside, because it's basically done.

For grown-up pizza, ignore the sauce and instead drizzle on a generous supply of olive oil. Smooth it around with a brush, and then take your slow roasted tomatoes (quick--before they burn!) out of the oven and place them on the pizza dough like you're making a beautiful tomato mosaic. (Yet another reason my Domino's Pizza employers kept me away from the pizzas and on the phone...I was tragically slow at making pizzas.) 

(Oh, and you should also crank up your oven temperature at this point to about 425--or 450 if you're brave. Hot ovens = good pizza.)

Dab the top with bits of delicious goat cheese and/or sliced fresh mozzarella. Toss a handful of good shredded Parmesan cheese over the whole thing, and set it aside.

For zucchini pizza, make another beautiful mosaic with your sliced zucchini that hopefully has not burned as it roasted in your oven. Add whatever cheese makes you smile, and set it aside.

Make another kid pizza to use up that final ball of dough (or make whatever kind you want...hey, I'm not the boss of you), and start putting them in the oven! (Ok, maybe I am the boss of you...)

Set the timer for about 10 minutes, which is when you should start checking on your pizzas in earnest. It may take 15 to 20 to finish baking, but I'm putting that all on you. When it looks like how you like pizza to look, take it out and impress your friends and neighbors! 

Enjoy!