Pizza Friday!

When my husband and I were first married, we always kept Date Friday as something special. After our first son, we instituted Pizza Friday as a family tradition. We ordered in a pizza once a week. When our second son was born, we started making pizza at home from those store-bought crusts. It was nice to still have Pizza Friday as a special family meal, but it was a shame that the pizza sucked. I found a solution that is even better - HOME MADE PIZZA. From HOME MADE DOUGH. Really. The dough recipe is this one, from epicurious.com for basic pizza dough.

Husband likes a thick crust pizza, so I actually up the recipe to three cups of flour and a full cup of water. I have left the amounts of yeast and salt the same and haven't had a problem so far.

I feed my yeast with a little black strap molasses. It makes them happy, it makes me happy, and it looks cool in a measuring cup.

Once the dough combines to this point I can leave my mixer to knead it on low for about 10 minutes, or as long as it takes me to undo whatever damage the kids did to the living room or each other in the last few minutes.

Once it's a nice, springy dough, I can either fridge it over night and make it tomorrow, deep freeze it until the morning of pizza night, or just put it in a bowl to rise 1.5 hours before dinner. (I have been awful about planning ahead, so lately it's been the last option).

A whole pizza takes us three cups of flour, a tsp of salt, a tsp of yeast, a tsp of sugar/molasses, half a jar of sauce, half a packet of cheese, and a little bit of olive oil. In other words, less than five bucks. Compare this to a pizza from the pizzeria that costs about 15 bucks.

In a side note, we recently had pizzeria pizza for the first time in a long time. It totally sucked compared to this. True story.