This weekend was about catching up on things. I was given a big bag of lemons from a friend who lives close by and I took stock of things currently in my refrigerator that needed to be used soon. It all started with a pizza fiasco on Friday night.
But first a quick story…
In 2017, I spent a month in Italy. Half of the trip was a study abroad program with Gonzaga University for my Masters in Organizational Leadership. The two classes were Renaissance Leadership for the 21st Century and Renaissance Rhetoric. Those first two weeks were a blast and had us visiting incredible sights in Rome, Florence, and Sienna and eating a lot of great Italian Food. Midway through the trip, my husband joined me and we spent the final two weeks on our own. He’s not much of a museum guy and because my classes had already afforded me the opportunity to visit so many great museums, I tried to focus more on experiences when it was just the two of us.
When we first arrived in Florence I wanted to make sure we had something fun to do right away and we started with a pizza and gelato making class in a Tuscan villa. It was great. We toured a winery and took a bus out to what amounted to a large “teaching” kitchen tucked into a Tuscan hillside. It was lovely. The other “students” were American’s like us, but the instructors were local and quite patient and kind with us.
We learned how to make pizza dough from scratch and followed with some instruction and background about what makes Italian pizza so great. Turns out that the key is simplicity. The sauce was no more than plain tomato sauce with a little salt and pepper and the crust is thin.
When we returned home we started making pizza at home quite a lot but after a few months, our homemade pizza parties declined in frequency. The Coronavirus pandemic changed all that and we’ve been back at it every Friday – or most Fridays.
Every month I make pizza dough. The recipe (from Joanne Ozug via The Pioneer Woman) makes enough dough for four 10-12 inch pizzas and it freezes well. But I don’t make pizza every week because that would start to get boring (I know this from experience). Instead, I mix it up and sometimes the dough becomes a calzone or a stromboli depending on what I have on hand. I use a pizza stone preheated for at least 15 min in a 500℉ oven and a cooking time of 8-12 minutes.
Which brings me to recent events. Last Friday, I made pizza dough and I made a beautiful calzone stuffed with olives, mushrooms, salami, pepperoni, cheese and sauce (I admit I do punch up the simple sauce with a bit of garlic and Italian herbs).
It was beautiful.
Here’s a picture of it…Looks great doesn’t it?
But this week (and there are no pictures of this) I had such trouble. The dough defrosted fine and was in good shape, but either I didn’t get enough flour on the board, it was too warm, or maybe it was because I rolled the dough instead of stretching it. I dressed the pizza up but when I tried to slide the pizza peel under the dough to transport it to the oven it just bunched up and it was all a mess. I stretched it out and tried again without success.
Finally, we managed to roll the pizza up on both sides and get some parchment under it and I could get the peel in place. Into the oven and on to the pizza stone it went. But when I pulled the peel out a big hole opened in the middle so it was like a pizza donut. I was exasperated but let it go.
After a few minutes at 500℉ I smelled burning plastic. We opened the oven because the light wasn’t working and we suspected that a new bulb wasn’t exactly oven safe. With the oven off but still at a super high temperature, we shut off the breaker and removed the light fixture. Later after some troubleshooting, we think that last week when I made the calzone I let the plastic cutting board touch the oven grate and what we smelled was that leftover plastic burning up.
Still, I had this half cooked pizza sitting on the counter now with no oven I could use. I ended up pulling out a stovetop griddle to finish cooking the crust (the toppings were fine) and it worked as well as could be expected. In the end, we ate our Salavador Dali inspired pizza. By some miracle the donut hole had even closed itself up and while it was oddly shaped it tasted fine. Ah the joy of home cooking,
I still had quite a few other cooking projects lined up for the weekend…
A friend dropped off a big bag of lemons so I made lemon bars (recipe here).
I’ll be using the remainder of the lemons to make homemade limoncello.
There were also some leftover pizza toppings in the fridge that needed to be used up so I picked up some ciabatta rolls at the store and made Stouffers-like french bread pizzas.
I froze these overnight on the cookie sheet, wrapped them individually in plastic wrap, then put them all back into large zip bags and back in the freezer until I need them. They are perfect for a quick WFH lunch – They come out perfectly crisp from the toaster oven at 375°F for 20 minutes.
Finally, I capped out the weekend with bread.
This didn’t come out quite as big as I like, so I need to keep experimenting but this no-knead bread dough is good and I got to use my fancy bread cloche from Emile Henry (mine is red and I did not pay this much – thanks to Costco).
That was my busy cooking weekend and I also managed to sneak in a round of golf with a good friend and a few loads of laundry.