Pizzzzza!!!!

I've had it in me for weeks that I was going to make homemade pizza and it would be awesome and we would each make our own deliciousness to our liking.  So!  I used the Vegan with a Vengeance recipe.  This one is a yeast-ed recipe.  Lots of kneading and rising times.  I made the dough on Saturday and we got around to pizza-ing it up on Sunday.  Sorry for the lack of pictures, I'm going to start taking more of them!  Before we move on to the pizza, please allow me to introduce my ever faithful kitchen companion, Kyra!  Here she's trying to become bi-pedal, I'm guessing to get a hold of anything on the counter. 

Sorry for the dark shot! Isn't she the cutest thing? She has the nicest sense of humor...

This is my pizza before cheese. Please note the bonus bread sticks on the side. I can't remember why I did that, but they were yummy.

Up close shot of my toppings. That is my homemade, garden fresh tomato sauce, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and green peppers.

*Bonus tip for pitting olives!! I've whiled away some hours and given myself pain in my fingers trying to pry pits out of olives until I learned this little trick. All you have to do is lay the olive on the cutting board and whack it with the flat part of the knife. This separates the pit from the deliciousness and you can more easily extract the pit.

AJ's pizza before cheese. The only difference between our pizzas was the cheese. He didn't care to get to fancy, he was just happy to eat. Note the roundness of his pizza.

Con queso.

Mine with mozzeralla Daiya.

Up close.

AJ's fresh from the oven. I thought mine had a couple minutes more to go, so I left it in there. And that is when I smelled the burning. What a bummer!

Looks okay here, let's flip 'er over!!

Wah-waaah!!

I was pretty disappointed in the pizzas.  AJ liked his, although it was a little soggy in the middle and a thicker crust than he likes. Mine was still edible.  I guess that's what I get for waiting and hyping up a recipe. Haha.

And them we both got heartburn.

In conclusion! It's delivery from now on!!

Tomato Sauce: A Journey

I spent the summer growing tomatoes. I have no idea why a person who doesn't like tomatoes much would grow 4, count 'em, 4 tomato plants, but there I was. I convinced myself that they're better from the garden and they are, but they're still not entirely edible... So anyway, I ended up saucing a lot of these babies and leaving them on coworkers desks. These are the last of the batch.

Why yes, they are sitting on the kitchen floor, what of it?

I made the sauce very simply. I sauteed a little garlic in a pot. Okay a lot, like, we're out of garlic now. No worries about vampires for sure. I diced all the tomatoes, threw them in a pot and let them cook down. At this point I realized that AJ has NO spices so I let it all cool down and threw it in the freezer for the next weekend. Flash forward a week and I'm back in the suburbs with my tomato sauce. I brought my own spices and added some basil, oregano and sugar to the tomato garlic mixture and let that simmer for a long time. I knew we were going to use this for pizza, so I really let it cook down and and thicken up. That was that. I've got some homemade pizza to blog about next!