Sometimes it take a village of bloggers to make my meals and this is one of them – I’m not sorry at all either because it was one of my best efforts!
First up, I made Kitchie Coo’s homemade pizza sauce. Please go visit her blog – she may be having a baby at this very moment! She’s a great cook and very good mommy.
The ingredients I used: I substituted a few ingredients because I didn’t have what Maggie called for but I wasn’t going to the store. Dried basil and cans of diced tomatoes.
I melted the butter and grated the onion (draining all the onion water off), a little garlic and all the other ingredients. I let it cook some and then I used an emersion blender to break up the diced tomatoes.
I let it cook down and it turned out just like Kitchie Coo’s picture! Yay!
Then I tackled the pizza dough. I have never ever opened a package of yeast before but I was determined yesterday. The first thing I did was go over to The Country Cook’s blog (you can find it here) and search for an easy pizza dough recipe. Of course she had a great tutorial and I was able to make it exactly the way she did! I used mostly the same ingredients although I didn’t have any semolina flour so I used all bread flour. These are the ingredients I used:
I put the yeast, warm water, and sugar into a measuring cup and then I totally stared at it for 5 minutes. It looked mostly like Brandie’s so I kept going.
Then I put the yeast and olive oil into the flour mixture and mixed using a wooden spoon. Then I really got nervous because I had to knead the dough she said. What the heck does the word “knead” really mean anyway?!?! So, I plopped it out there and went to town and you know what? It ended up looking just like hers!
I put a little olive oil into a bowl (I had also been preheating the oven to 175 F) and when it beeped that it was up to temp, I turned it off. I put the dough in the bowl and covered with a damp tea towel and put it in the oven for an hour. When it came out – Yay! It looked like Brandies!
I put it on my pizza pan and started smushing it out to the side and it ended up like this:
We go light on the sauce so I only put about ¼ Cup on and spread it out:
I put 1 lb of browned and drained hamburger all around and sprinkled jalapeño peppers throughout:
Sprinkled 2 Cups of mozzerela cheese over that. Put it into a 425F preheated oven and cooked it for 20 minutes. When it was done – I pulled it out and it looked like this!
I ate 1 piece and Mr. Picky eater ate 3. Today, we had leftovers and it looked just as good as it did last night, don’t you think? P.S. – I froze the rest of the pizza sauce for 4 other pizza I will definitely be making!
