No Such Thing as Bad Pizza

It has long been a tradition in my family to have pizza on Friday nights. This was the way of things when I was growing up, and a tradition that my wife was good enough to carry on once we got married. Usually my wife's the one making the pizzas (that's right, plural), but now that 2019 has brought about Boys Night in the Kitchen, this time WE got to tackle the pizza making.

Now we cheated a little because our recipe called for store-bought pizza dough, and we instead called upon our ringer to whip up her standard dough for us. Then we set about making our pizzas. Our objective was little personal pizzas, and with my wife's dough recipe we had enough for about a dozen.

Things got interesting early on as my oldest decided that he wanted a heart shaped pizza. Okay, sure, no problem. So he - not clear if intentionally or not - made a heart-shaped dough. Then he decided he wanted a "red pizza". Tomato sauce and red bell peppers. Check and check. THEN he decided that there would be NO CHEESE. And we had a near meltdown about that. But to his credit, he ate his little red pizza, no problem. That said, technically, I'm not sure it still counts as a pizza...

piz·za

/ˈpētsə/

noun

1. a dish of Italian origin consisting of a flat, round base of dough baked with a topping of tomato sauce and cheese

Anyhow, we experimented with shredded mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, black olives, leftover Italian sausage, pepperoni, bell peppers and tomato sauce to make a variety of dishes. While I don't think we won any awards for their appearances, all of our pizzas were edible so that counts for something.

Now to go alongside our pizza, we made a strawberry almond salad with a maple mustard dressing. This was not our first attempt to make this salad, and for a dish that doesn't require a lot of effort, it's actually pretty good. We did deviate slightly on our maple mustard dressing since the garlic clove it called for had started to sprout, but honestly there wasn't a huge difference in flavor.

So yeah, ultimately it was a successful evening and it even made for a good lunch the next day. Now I just have to earn my wife's trust enough that she'll let us try and make the dough!