A Pizza Weekend

Those that know me know that I'm not a "crave pizza all the time" kind of person. This weekend though, somehow it became an unplanned pizza weekend- meaning 3 pizza meals in a row! However, they were all different kinds of pizza which made it okay.

1) We invited some friends over on Friday for dinner and we decided to have an interactive homemade pizza night. I made a honey wheat dough in our bread machine and Jeremy made a regular white dough. For toppings, we had a whole range from sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, mixed veggies, and a lot of mozzerella cheese. We split the dough and each made our own personal pizzas which was nice since everyone could choose what they wanted. Somehow the girls had lots of veggies and the boys had meat and cheese... go figure... We also had a regular tomato sauce as well as a vodka sauce that was requested by our guest. My pizza turned out really well but I was so eager to eat it that I took a blurry pizza and didn't realize it!

2) For lunch on Saturday (I skipped breakfast), I had been invited by an out of town college friend to come up to Berkeley for a mini college friends reunion at Cheeseboard Pizza. For those that don't know, they serve"gourmet" thin crust pizza but only one flavor of the day. That day it was corn, carmelized onions, green peppers, key limes, goat cheese, and mozzerella cheese. It was fantastic and great to hang out with my girls from college! We even got free Dreyer's since they were having an annual scoop day- can't beat that!

3) For dinner on Saturday, our friends had invited us to go to Pizza Chicago, so we decided to go. Deep dish pizza is again different from the first two pizzas I had, so I was up for it. I apologize that the picture is again blurry because of my desire to eat. The one I ate was the "Sears Tower" veggie pizza with black olives, artichokes, onions, red peppers, and zucchini. I love veggies so hopefully it offsets the unhealthiness of pizza...

Even though I wouldn't want to do a pizza weekend again, I'll admit I did enjoy it! Jeremy didn't go to Cheeseboard but I know he loves pizza and loved how much we had it this weekend!

Homemade Pizza

A while back, Jeremy and I attempted to make homemade pizza- everything from scratch!  We had received a pizza stone as one of our gifts as well as a bread machine.  Paired with Jeremy's obsession with pizza, it only made sense we would try it!

We made honey whole wheat pizza dough, topped it with some tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and veggies on my side.  Jeremy's complaint was no pepperoni which we adjusted for our second attempt a few weeks later. I highly enjoyed my pizza. The dough was very wheat-y, which I actually liked and Jeremy was okay with as well.  The dough was a little thicker than I think it should have been, but these are all learning opportunities!  I'm glad I loaded up my side with veggies because it added so much flavor and depth to the wheat-y pizza.  Maybe Jeremy is a purist in wanting the taste of cheese alone (except when pepperoni is available)... but I always tell him to eat more veggies.

The only sad thing was that the pizza stuck to the pizza stone depsite the oil and sprinkled cornmeal.  It may have been because I tried to stretch out the door further on the stone so again, a learning point!  We will definitely need to keep trying to "perfect" our homemade pizza!