Pizza From Scratch

Thank you, Heather for sending me this recipe from the Bread Bible! This crust was easy, fit into my day's schedule, and DELICIOUS!!!!!!!!!! I'm serious. I wanted to save leftovers. This was not possible due to the level of delicious. Had to be eaten. All of it. Right away.

Anyhoo, i got up around 9 (yay for weekends with puppies who sleep through the night with no accidents!) and put together this dough (into which i added about 20% whole wheat flour and some dried herbs), leaving it out for half an hour, then popping it into the fridge. About an hour before cooking time i took it out of the fridge and stuck it on a pan that i should have greased more as i had a hard time dislodging the pizza for serving later. Every single ingredient i used was from my garden or a friend's who i made mozzarella with that morning. Not my best batch of mozz, but we were highly distracted by puppy playtime and neighborhood gossip.
For this batch of pizza i used the following toppings:

• Roasted garlic cloves
• Roasted thai eggplants with olive oil, smoked paprika and salt
• Multiplying onions
• Fresh diced tomatoes
• Fresh diced bell pepper
• Fresh diced red ripe serrano pepper
• Salt and pepper
• Pesto sauce
• Bunch genovese basil, few leaves lemon basil, pinch walnuts, pinch romano cheese, salt, generous drizzle garlic infused olive oil

I remembered that my stick blender had this handy dandy food processor attachment - worked great for this small batch of pesto without having to dig out the big food processor. I baked the crust for 5 minutes, popped a huge air bubble, slathered with pesto, topped with toppings, baked another 5 minutes and voila! Deliciosa! Paired with the very odd but cool film "Something Wicked This Way Comes" we had a most excellent Sunday night.  Once i have a more active life filled with fence building and other laborious chores we'll have to make this a Sunday tradition! For now, my mostly sedentary self will only indulge in this recipe on special occasions. I hope to increase my 'bread' repertoire more, and this was a good start to help me build my self confidence.

The bottom got nice and crispy but not burnt, the dough complimented the toppings perfectly, a little bit of spinkled cheese and salt tied it all together: groans of satisfaction filled the room.

Do you have a favorite pizza crust recipe?