Homemade Pizza

Although it may be strange this Homemade Pizza sums up a lot of our weekend.

On Friday night David and I went out on a date to dinner at Abuelos and then a movie at the cheapies. We can financially go on a date like this about once a month and we really look forward to it!.Our dinner was awesome and the movie that we saw was Tangled… so good! For real, I was laughing the whole time.

Back to the pizza. On Saturday morning we got up nice and early to some beautiful weather. We took our pup and some grocery totes on a walk to the farmer’s market here in Lexington. It is only a 15 minute walk to the market from where we live and this past Saturday was the first weekend that it was open on Saturday! We hope to go most Saturdays and take part of our grocery budget to purchase our fruits and veggies there. We bought some corn, onions, honey, strawberries and… tomatoes. David and I don’t usually like tomatoes but we LOVE real, fresh, local tomatoes. And these tomatoes are the stars of this pizza.

So this morning we woke up again to a beautiful morning, went to church, then invited our friends Kellie and Ian over for lunch. And as you probably guessed, we ate this awesome dish. Here is the recipe:

Homemade Pizza

Ingredients

1 packet active, dry yeast

3 cup water

1/8 tsp sugar

3 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 Tbs olive oil

Cooking Spray

2 tomatoes

1 lb fresh spinach

3-4 cloves of garlic

Some salt, pepper, oregano and basil to taste

2 cups mozzarella cheese

To make the dough, fill a measuring cup with 1 cup of warm water. Mix in the sugar, then sprinkle the yeast over top. Let it sit for 5-7 minutes until it is bubbly. In the meantime, mix together flour and salt in a bowl (if you have a kitchen aid, use it!). Once the yeast is activated, pour the mixture into the flour and salt. If you have a Kitchen aid mixer, use the kneading tool and just run it on low until a dough is formed. If not, just use your hands to knead.

Put the dough in a bowl coated with cooking spray, and then coat the dough with the spray. Cover it with a clean kitchen towel and let it rise for an hour. I usually put mine in the oven at the lowest heat possible and it works well. Wherever your bread rises, it has to be warm (about 85-90 degrees) and free from drafts.

After an hour it should be double the volume that it was at first. Take it out, punch the dough, turn it around, coat with spray and let it rise again for 30 minutes.

Alright, now you have nice yeasty dough! Sprinkle some flour on two pieces of parchment paper (big enough to hold a pizza). Your dough should stay on the parchment paper the whole time. Otherwise it gets holes easily. You can either make 2 pizzas, which fed 4 of us, or you can make 1 and then freeze the remaining dough. So split the dough up, roll it out or if you get brave toss it in the air until you kind of have a pizza-shaped crust. Fold up the edges just a bit. Spread some olive oil on the dough, then put it back in the slightly warm oven to rise for 20 minutes.

While that is rising, chop up your tomatoes (here, I cut out the really wet part because I have found that it makes the pizza too runny, but it is up to you!). Also, chop up your garlic, and rinse your spinach.

Finally, remove the risen dough from the oven, then preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Spread the garlic, basil, oregano, salt, and pepper on the crust. Add anything else you like (sometimes I put red pepper or pepperoni for the hubs). Then add a layer of spinach, one of the tomatoes and 1 cup of cheese. If you are making both pizzas, do the same for the other. Then bake the pizzas in the oven for 15ish minutes.

Enjoy the taste of summer!

So I know this may sound a bit complicated, but I promise it is easy. The biggest thing is giving yourself plenty of time to allow the dough to rise. And it doesn’t have to be super exact. For example, I whipped up the dough this morning and let it rise for the first hour while I got ready for church. Then I flipped it and turned the oven off and just let it sit in there for the 2 hours that we were gone at church. This allowed it to rise enough the second time. Then when we got home we only had to do the easy part. You should make this-it is so good!

Ahh… Sundays.